


50 Ways To Leave Your Lover

by Cephied_Variable



Category: Metal Gear
Genre: (but he is the dumbest man who ever lived), Big Boss did Nothing Wrong, M/M, Multiple Dubious Interpretations of the Boss's Legacy, PTSD, The Cycle of Abuse, War Feelings in the Time of Early Neoliberalism, content warning: bbkaz
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-01-02
Updated: 2020-01-19
Packaged: 2021-02-27 12:07:32
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 26,162
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22076683
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cephied_Variable/pseuds/Cephied_Variable
Summary: They call it "kiss and make up" for a reason, but not all conflicts of interest can be solved so easily. Eventually something's gotta give.
Relationships: Big Boss/Kazuhira Miller
Comments: 37
Kudos: 134





	1. [DATE WITH PAZ]

**Author's Note:**

> I’ve been asked many times how I think Big Boss *really* felt about Kaz, and it turns out my answer to that question is kind of fucking complicated.

I.

“Hey Boss, wanna play ‘ _Never Have I Ever’_?”

Kaz is curiously sober for a Saturday night. He spins a chair around and splays himself across from you, slamming down a bottle of tequila and two shot glasses like a peace offering. You’re at the back of the mess hall, blindspot to the wall. At the other end, the door swings open and in drifts the sound of guitar and drunken conversation. You roll a warm beer can, untouched, between your palms and feel the aluminum crinkle. Tomorrow is Peace Day and Kaz has spent the last twelve hours whirling around base: barking orders, adjusting decorations, singing offkey and getting in your hair about “making appearances” for the “sake of the men”. He’s got a pen tucked behind one ear and a bruise from where you smashed his face into the shower floor last week that the sunglasses don’t quite hide.

As it turns out: he _is_ capable of self control.

“Not in the mood, Kaz.” You turn the beer can another 180 degrees.

“Yeah, you’re never in the mood to do anything fun, but indulge me, okay?” Your eyes follow the curve of his inner arm all the way up to his face. He’s grinning, but there are shadows lurking beneath it.

Twelve weeks ago, Kaz came to get you at the edge of Lago Cocibolca. And afterwards he listened to everything you had to say, even though you -

“Hn, sometimes it seems like all I do is indulge you.” You reach for a glass anyway. Tap it against the tabletop twice. Kaz pours the tequila with a salacious flourish. It’s remarkable, in a certain application of the term, how he’s able to coach sexual implication into mundane actions. It’s even more remarkable when it doesn’t work. Recently, you saw him attempt to flirtatiously spoon a lump of curry onto Cécile’s plate; instead, it went straight into his lap.

“Never have I ever indulged my business partner’s ludicrous box-based R&D requests,” Kaz retorts flawlessly, showing his teeth. You take a drink.

“This is why no one plays cards with you anymore, Kaz.”

“Drinking with you and your supernatural metabolism is playing against a stacked deck, Boss. Give me a break.”

You give him plenty of breaks, considering he hasn’t once played fair since the day you met. “Never have I ever worn sunglasses, inside, after nine PM.”

 _‘Heh’_ goes Kaz, and he adjusts his shades before taking a drink. “Never have _I_ ever -” he drags it out as he pours another two shots. “- had to get dewormed like a stray cat for eating something I shouldn’t have off the damn ground.”

You grin into the glass. Kaz wouldn’t touch you for two weeks after that, which was pretty rich considering some of the places you’ve seen him take off his pants. “Never have I ever shown my bare ass to the men.”

Kaz raises an eyebrow. “Literally, or metaphorically?”

“Both,” you reply, and he takes two shots. _Good one, Boss. That’s why you’re the best_.

Ten questions in and you realize this isn’t foreplay. Kaz already came crawling back to you a few nights ago. _‘You seriously want me to stop fooling around with women?’_ he asked, incredulous and strangely bright-eyed. _‘I don’t like how you treat them_ ,’ you answered honestly. Kaz handles the women he seduces with the care of a soldier who cuts ears off corpses. It’s ugly and artificial, like so many of the things Kaz pretends to be. _‘Oh yeah, I’m sure that’s it.’_ \- he said that with a stormy set to his jaw, but his hands were already sliding up your thighs.

You know from experience that he was gone after those first three shots. It takes a bit to hit him, and when it does he starts getting morose. You’re alone in the mess, the two of you, with the overhead lights switched off and the seabreeze rattling a discarded can around and around on the steel flooring where someone tossed it an hour ago. Outside, there’s a burst of laughter and you can hear Paz shrieking _‘No, Chico, put me down! Wait, wait -’_ but you can tell she doesn’t mean it. Kaz’s chin is in his palm and he’s staring hard at the wall behind your shoulder. Usually he’s a chipper drunk, but he’s been chewing his lip for thirty seconds. “Uh…” he says haltingly, and you meet his eyes.

“Got something to tell me, Kaz?”

His gaze inches towards the ceiling. “Well.” He loosens his scarf a bit and your hand twitches with an unconscious desire to do it back up. Pull it a little tighter.

Beyond the mess door, Chico is swearing in Spanish. _‘S-stop laughing! She’s heavier than she looks!’_

“Ah,” Kaz tries to smile. He holds his glass aloft. “Never have I ever gotten crushed to death by a sixteen year old girl.”

You keep staring at him and his vague, watery expression. Kaz is an excellent liar, but not to you. Not anymore. You push your own shot towards him and say: “Never have I ever engaged in such an obvious tactical deflection.” If you had, you’d be dead by now. He blinks and goes to take the shot, but you set a hand on his wrist. “C’mon, Kaz, cut the crap.”

“Okay, look -” the tequila goes everywhere when he sets the glass down. “It’s, uh, about Zadornov…”

You sigh. “Again?”

“What? Oh, no - no, he didn’t get out, I just -”

 _‘Auuuugh!’_ shouts someone from outside.

“Go on.”

Kaz puts both elbows on the table and runs a hand through his hair. The coiff has gone limp after a whole day sweating beneath the autumn heat. “Shit, I should’ve taken it slower with the tequila. Why didn’t you stop me?”

“Last time I tried to stop you from drinking yourself sick, you put my cigar out in my beer.”

“Right, and then you pried open one of the keggers and dunked my head in. That was cute, Boss, real cute.”

It was pretty cute, actually. You can’t approve of Kaz’s methodology, but you don’t blame the girls who fall for his bullshit: he certainly has his charms. This bout of melancholic hesitation, however, is not one of them. You weren’t suspicious before, but it’s unusual for Kaz to get tongue tied. He tries again. “Look - it’s about Zadornov-” you nod. “And -”

“Commander Miller!” It’s Paz who throws the mess doors open, hair askew, eyes impossibly wide. She’s breathless and panicked, but she pauses with her hands braced on either door as she looks the two of you over. Kaz throws his chair back with a deafening _screeeech_ because he has a “thing” about “getting caught” together like this, even though he walks around base with his hand practically in your back pocket most of the time.

“What’s wrong, Paz?” you ask.

“Um -” she covers her mouth with a ghostlike hand. “Mosquito - he went overboard.”

Kaz caps the tequila with grim finality and sways to his feet. “It’s about that time of night…” Whoever last made an ass out of themselves while drunk is always on clean-up duty for the next party. A rule Kaz laid down rather blithely, you think, considering how often he’s the one who suffers for it.

“Need a hand, Kaz?”

He turns to look at you, but the light from outside masks his expression. For a moment, you think he’s going to come back, accept your offering, finish what he was trying to say before. Instead, he gives you a little two-finger salute . “Nah, Boss, just sit tight and get some rest. We’ll talk later.”

“After Peace Day?” 

“Yeah,” he laughs ruefully. “Wouldn’t wanna ruin Peace Day.”

*

Of course, Peace Day never came.

  
  


II.

A week earlier you were sitting in the office attempting to confirm the most recent Op deployments. Across from you, Chico was sighing, spinning his chair from side to side. _Clunk, clunk_ ; he goes 180 degrees stops himself with the toe of his boot and swings back. “ _I just don’t know what to say to her_ -” he says. You give your signature on Kaz’s request to earmark funds for solar panels on R&D strut and point out that Chico talks to Paz every day. _“No, not like that_ ,” Chico sighs some more. _“It’s this festival Commander Miller is planning… I want to do something special for her, y’know?”_ You don’t know, actually. Not the way Chico wants from you. _Clunk, clunk._ _“What if I went over to the mainland and got her like, a gift or something? Jewelry, or - or - what about flowers?”_ _Clunk, clunk. “Paz, she’s wild about the environment, right?”_ There’s no reason for a talented scout like Chico to spend money on something as easy to procure as flowers. Besides, he probably knows the local landscape better than most florists in San José.

“Yeah -” _clunk_ , “- but that’s what makes it special!” _Clunk_.

You finally look at Chico. He lets the chair rock back into position and meets your gaze, pouting. He really is just a kid. What were you like at his age? You can’t remember being tangled up in such small concerns; for so long, you’ve lived your life one moment at a time. You don’t know anyone who had a normal childhood. Even Kaz was practically running his mother’s shop himself by twelve.

“Chico, why are you asking me all these questions?”

His eyes go wide. “Because you gave me such good advice before! I thought this would be a piece of cake for someone like you!”

“It’s because I am the way I am that I can’t really help you.”

Chico huffs in disbelief. “What, haven’t you had a lady-friend before, Snake?”

That’s a good question. “Not one like Paz, that’s for sure.”

“I see.” He frowns and wrenches his hat around and around again in his hands. “Maybe I should’ve asked Commander Miller instead. He’s always chasing after girls on his off hours.”

You fingers tighten, almost unconsciously, around your pen. Yeah, you’d been meaning to ask _Commander Miller_ about that too. “ _Definitely_ don’t ask Kaz. Any advice he’d give you on that front would blow up in your face, trust me.”

“ _Ay_ ,” Chico lets out a long, belaboured sigh, but his mood has lightened. “- if you’re both this hopeless with women, it’s no wonder you spend so much time together.”

“The kind of life we lead doesn’t exactly leave you with enough time to try and build a family.”

“So what? You don’t believe people can fall in love on the battlefield?”

“That depends on how you define love,” you begin to drag the pen down the edge of the report. “The bonds you form on the battlefield can be powerful. In a way, they’re the purest form of relationship. But I’m not sure if -” You notice that you’ve accidentally dug a ditch through a half-inch of the paper stack. The damage is negligible, but Kaz will complain anyway. “It’s not the same thing,” you finish.

Chico has another argument left. “What about Che and Aleida March, huh? They did it. They even had four children together, all while fighting for independence!”

You grimace, subtly rub one of your temples, are surprised to find that your forehead is bare. “Yes, but Paz isn’t like Aleida March, is she Chico?”

Chico opens his mouth to respond, but the thought seems to get lost somewhere on the way. He blinks, then looks down at his boots. His hair hides his expression, but you’re reminded of something Amanda told you: that their mother left when their father became a freedom fighter. “Hm,” he says very quietly, and taps a scuffed toe against the steel floor. He’s in civilian trousers and a t-shirt today, but still wearing his combat boots. They’re a few sizes too big and he won’t wear anything else even though you’ve explained to him in detail how he could injure his feet.

Suddenly, he vaults from his seat, sending the chair skittering across the floor. “Thank you for the advice, Snake! I think I know what I need to do now!”

“You… do?”

He pulls his hat on with both hands and gives you a salute before running off. “Yeah! Catch you around!”

You watch him go, wondering what - exactly - he got out of the conversation. Light streams through the open door, catching the dust like _white petals floating through the sticky, afternoon air -_

\- you press your eye shut but the petals remain, like they’re stuck to the flesh of your eyelid.

Later, you pass by Amanda and her top point-man Gil drilling the recent US recruits on guerilla tactics. You recognize one of the new guys as having been what you all jokingly refer to as a “conscript”: that is, as far as you know, he was in the brig last week. Now: he stands engaged in enthusiastic conversation with Gil, asking questions about the Sandinistas’s modified AKs in clumsy Spanish. Comrades, despite the contradictory economic ideologies they’d been programmed with in their homelands. Amanda catches your eye as you pass and shoots you a salute - a mirror of the one her brother gave you earlier. You nod back - note that she’s still moving with a noticeable limp. It’s possible she’ll never walk properly again, but she’s stronger for it.

At the heliport, Morpho is showing Cécile her way around the Crocodile controls. She sees you and practically trills.

“Ah, how is this Snake - Morpho says I have many of the natural skills possessed by a good pilot. Soon I shall be a soldier myself!”

“Is that so?” You lean against the chassis of the helicopter and light up a cigar. “Thinking of signing up for real?”

She hangs over the edge of the pallet, one shapely knee pulled up to her chin and her hair glittering in the evening sun. “Well, if the vagaries of the Cold War continue to keep me from returning to _Paris_ , I suppose I will have to.”

Her tone is playful, however you consider it seriously for a moment. Cécile has a sharp mind and even sharper eyes. Her easy humour and natural beauty contributes positively to base morale, a net positive. You can’t say you mind having her around. But -

\- your heaven isn’t for turning civilians into soldiers. And Cécile isn’t who you were looking for. “Are you sure you can tolerate Kaz hounding after you as part of a full time profession?”

“ _Oh,_ I would not worry about that,” she laughs. “Monsieur Miller is too mortified since the incident with the wine to speak with me recently. I know how to handle men like him.”

“Mm hmm.” From what you’ve heard, the more likely scenario is that he’s been distracted.

She sets her chin on her knee, tipping her chin as if she knows something you don’t. “... if you are looking for him, I believe I saw Monsieur Miller practicing that ridiculous song of his behind the mess hall earlier.”

While she’s here, you might as well take advantage of Cécile’s Intel chops. 

Kaz doesn’t hear you coming. He’s usually sharper than this - you’ve made sure of that - but instead of berating him, you take the opportunity to observe him, unseen. He’s kicked back on a crate of canned beans and chick peas: shades pushed back, one leg dangling, the other tapping out a beat. Nuke is sleeping on the next crate over, tail twitching every time Kaz strums out a minor chord. In profile, you can see just the edge of his knuckles as he lazily plucks the chords. When asked, he claims that the guitar is a “party trick” he learned to “pick up chicks” in college, but you find him like this more and more often these days. Once - two camps before Barranquilla - he nearly got shot going back for his old guitar. He still talks about it sometimes, can’t seem to let go even though as far as you can tell the new instrument is just as good as the last one and the difference is merely sentiment. That’s a problem with Kaz: he thinks everything can last forever.

\- if it’s on _his_ terms, that is. You step into his light and he looks up slowly, showing you a lazy smile as he continues to play. “Come to give me pointers on my song writing technique, Boss?”

You shake your head and lean against the wall opposite him. The shadows are long and blue on the East side of the rig and the afternoon seems endless. There’s laughter floating out of the mess hall along with the scent of gallo pinto sizzling in the kitchen.

“It sounds good,” you admit. A bit of a downer for the kind of party Kaz usually throws, but he’s explained many times - usually while drunk and to anyone who will listen - that this evocation of nostalgic heart-ache is the soul of _enka_ music. _“There’s nothing more universal than a song that makes you sad even though you can’t quite say why_ . _”_ There’s Latin influence in the composition too, no doubt picked up from the folk songs he learned during his failed stint as a FARC drill instructor. He’s not wrong: music is a powerful equalizer - a tool that can be used just as effectively to bolster solidarity and liberation as to quash it. Art has always belonged to rebels, the oppressed. Which brings to mind an ugly argument you once witnessed between David and Donald about the cultural origins of modern rock music. Strange that Zero’s imperial, old world attitude did nothing to alienate Anderson from his cause, you’d imagine -

\- well, it doesn’t bear thinking about. They can do whatever they want: David, Clark, Anderson and Eva too. You’re done putting a convenient face on their machinations. Big Boss is dead and everything he tried to create is tainted. The MSF is something different.

Kaz finishes his practice and casually slings the guitar flat across his lap. He pulls his shades down and shoots you a rather solicitous look over the wire rims. “If you like it so much, maybe I should get on it and compose us our own national anthem.”

“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves, Kaz.”

“Are you kidding me?” He laughs and sweeps his arms wide, disturbing Nuke from his nap. The cat does an offended little shake and goes back to sleep half a foot away. “This is the _time_ to be getting ahead of ourselves! We’ve finally got everything we want in our grasp! Now all we have to do it keep it.”

 _Yeah -that’s the hard part_. There will be plenty of time for that conversation later. “You’ve gotten comfortable.”

“How many times do I have to explain it, Snake? It doesn’t matter if you and I are comfortable - what matters is that we’re offering something a conventional militia can’t. If most of our men can’t go home, might as well turn Mother Base into the kinda place it’s impossible to get homesick in.”

He goes to lay his guitar in the case. The motion pulls at the collar of his uniform and reveals a dark bite mark just above the collarbone, one you definitely didn’t put there. He hasn’t been in your bed in weeks. Under your desk, behind the armoury, enticing you into the back of a covered jeep under the auspice of talking about the forward defense guns, sure, but with the uptick in female staff lately he’s been trying his luck with women again, and Kaz once told you that he’s the kind of guy who makes his _own_ luck.

“Hn, you really are trying to turn this place into a luxury hotel.”

Kaz’s behaviour with women has always struck you as reprehensible, but there weren’t many consequences to letting him go strut around some seedy dance hall on his off hours; entertaining doomed, one-night affairs with rebel girls who probably needed to blow off steam just as much as he did. He can’t be treating his own soldiers that way, though.

He breathes out, hard, through his nostrils. “Look, I already explained that expanding the shower facilities to include a sauna isn’t just about _comfort_ \- there are proven therapeutic effects! Ones that you’d benefit from yourself, Boss.”

How to drive the message home? You can’t just tell him to _stop_ \- words are Kaz’s best weapon, and he doesn’t appreciate having the metaphorical gun turned back on him. He only gets it when you use your fists. You were the same way when you were young.

You push off the wall and jerk your chin in the direction of the showers. “Show me, then.” He perks up like a dog being thrown a stick. Doesn’t suspect a thing.

Kaz is so furious afterward that he avoids you for a full forty-eight hours and change. No need to worry: his moods are as predictable as the rainy season in his homeland and by Wednesday he’s in your quarters an hour before midnight, arms crossed haughtily as he does the usual spiel about how you’re a real piece of work, do you know how many people saw that Boss, are you seriously trying to tell him to stop sleeping with women. There’s no bite to it because halfway through the rant he’s set his palms on your knees with intent to move them higher. He’s eager to reconcile and tries to unzip your pants with his teeth, however you haven’t heard a single word to indicate he’s thought seriously about what you said. You catch him by the hair and twist, relishing the shocked yelp that crawls out of his throat when you lift him up. “You think it’s that easy to apologize?”

He tries to laugh, but it comes out like a wheeze. “Th-they call it ‘kiss and make up’ f-for a reason, Boss.”

He reaches for your arm in an attempt to give himself leverage, but you were expecting that. You grab his wrist and use it to flip him face-down onto the cot; crawl over him - a knee in the small of his back and his dominant arm wrenched at an unnatural angle. He’s breathing heavy already. The room fills with the sound of it. “In this case, that’s like saying two wrongs make a right.” The cot creaks as you dig your knee in deep.

“Jesus Christ, Snake,” Kaz grunts, “what do you want from me?”

“This isn’t about what I want, Kaz. It’s about what you want.”

“What _I_ want!? What I want is for you to stop trying to _manage_ my personal life. You’re my boss, not my -”

You twist his arm again and he cries out. “You’re the one who makes your personal life MSF business, Kaz. Why do you feel the need to behave this way?”

“B-because I _like_ sex! It’s not that…” he grunts and tries to struggle free. “- _fucking…_ complicated!”

Sex isn’t the only thing he likes. You don’t have to turn him over to tell that he’s so aroused it hurts. He’s bucking into the mattress beneath you, and not trying to be subtle about it. You ease your grip and give him enough space to roll you off - oh, he’s spitting fire now. You bounce to your feet, swerve backwards, watch Kaz stagger upright. You always let him take the first swing. That doesn’t always mean you let it land.

You catch his fist with a grin and hook a thumb up his sleeve to expose the bruises you left on his bicep the other day. “The marks I left will last a lot longer than what Swan did to your back,” you observe, pressing down on one until Kaz lets out a cracked, breathy moan.

The fight goes out of him and he looks suddenly unsure. “Uh, y-yeah,” he responds feebly. His fist is just a jumble of nerves in your palm. He comes apart so easily in your hands, a diamond desperately in need of polishing. You’re the only one who can give this to him. 

“No one would ever believe a woman did this to you. What do you tell them?”

You walk him backwards until his legs hit the cot and he stumbles straight onto it. It’s all part of the routine. He grasps your belt with both hands like he’s drowning, head tilted back, eyes bright and hungry.

“I don’t Snake, you… you know that. Not about this.”

You cup his chin, slide two fingers into his mouth as he hazily fumbles at the straps holding your uniform shut. He sucks your fingers in with a wet sound, languid and shameless. He’s probably been thinking about this for the past two days. It’s not the longest he’s put off resolving a disagreement, but it’s definitely up there.

Your thumb drifts up his cheek to graze the edge of his black eye. “Mmm, I guess if everyone knew about this, you’d have a harder time tricking our staff into your bed.”

Kaz bites down on your fingers so hard it nearly draws blood. That gets you good. _So_ good you’re not prepared for how hard he reels back to punch you this time. He manages to nail you in the face for real. _Impressive_. Your head snaps to the side and you wipe your mouth to find it bloody. He’s already taking another swing.

Ah - now _that’s_ your Kaz.

You’re laughing as you flow into your CQC stance. Kaz dives at you, head first, and you grapple him into the wall. The two of you struggle like that for a while, him cursing under his breath, you utterly focused on the way the motion of his heel betrays where his arm is going to go next. You needed this as much as he did, haven’t been off-base since Lago Cocibolca, grounded to desk work and rote training exercises by the medical staff. Kaz tries to trip you with his ankle, but you redirect the motion to slam his face into the wall again. You make sure he goes bruised-side first, grounding his cheek against the metal until he hisses. Your mentor told you to never use violence as a vice, but this is more than play - this is _communication_ . Kaz can take whatever you throw at him, _begs_ you to do it, pushes and pushes until you push him back. In moments like this you understand each other in ways other people can’t. You whip off your belt and he goes limp under you, entirely misreading your intent. So he’s not expecting it when you bring his wrists together and lash them behind his back.

”Wait -” he says, all lust-addled and confused when you spin him into the center of the room. You loop the other end of the strap around the lower bar of your desk, then take a generous step out of reach. Kaz doesn’t realize what you’ve done until he tries to follow and the desk rocks, yanking him back.

“What the -” he tugs again, harder this time, and the legs squeal against the floor. You cross your arms and survey your handiwork with a pleased expression. 

Kaz is less impressed. “Nice try, but you know we bought these on the cheap, right? They don’t weigh shit.” He drags the desk another inch off the wall to demonstrate. “I could haul this thing all the way back to my quarters without breaking a sweat.”

“Good luck getting through the door,” you reply.

He deflates, eyes following the arc of your arm as you fish a cigar out of your front pocket. He takes in the unhurried nature of your movements, notes the way you’re just rolling the cigar between thumb and forefinger - as if you haven’t decided whether or not to smoke it yet - and slumps to the floor in defeat. “... look, are we gonna fuck or not?”

You raise an eyebrow. “Is that the only thing you think about?”

“Snake, I know you’re repressed and all but it’s actually _normal_ to think about it all the time.”

You’ve decided not to smoke the cigar after all. Instead, you dig the heel of your boot into Kaz’s inner thigh and force it flush against the floor. He sucks in a pained breath as the lugs dent grooves into the sensitive skin. “You still haven’t answered me.”

 _“H-huh_?”

“Are you going to stop?”

Kaz sighs performatively. “You don’t want to fuck. You don’t want _me_ to fuck. What - am I supposed to just shrivel up and die?"

You ground your heel in until he croaks. “Are you really that weak?”

“N-no, Boss,” he grits through clenched teeth. “I’m saying you aren’t exactly making the best sales pitch here. You gotta bring s-something to table first if you wanna… if you wanna _bargain_ .” He tosses his head back: expression cocky, grinning through the pain, showing you his neck. _Classic Kaz._ “C’mon, haven’t I taught you anything?”

Of course, you always make the mistake of binding his hands when you should’ve just shoved a gag in his mouth. But you can’t really argue with his point. You ease your boot off his thigh and replace it with your hand. “Hold this for me,” you tell him, placing the cigar in his mouth lengthwise. He sputters around the wrapper, but shuts up fast when your hand crawls higher. The answer to this problem has been staring you in the face the entire time: all you need to do is leave marks on him that would raise questions he doesn’t want to answer. Two birds with one stone.

As usual: he lets you do whatever you want.

III.

_Three nights before Peace Day, the R &D team was prepping to run the first start-up test for ZEKE._ _You_ -

_It’s rainy season on the mainland, but the sky above Mother Base is cloudless. Huey’s going on about Reptile-pod response rates. You’re watching the smoke coil lazily around the tip of your cigar. No wind to take it anywhere else. The sky and sea blend together on the horizon. You’re -_

\- more concerned with Eagle Eye’s report about the team’s new sniper design specs. He’s explaining that using modern reproduction ammo in your old Mosin-Nagants has corroded the barrels. 

“- but we’ve figured out a way to strip them down and salvage most of the parts to modify our newer Russian rifles.”

“What’d I tell you about relying on World War II cast-offs, Boss,” Kaz jostles you playfully.

“They served us well until now.” You haven’t done any sniping yourself since your dominant eye got shot out in Tselinoyarsk. 

Kaz snorts. “Because we were only firing them twice a year.” He lifts his shades and flips, one-handed, through the clipboard Eagle Eye handed him. “The only question is what we do with the surplus ammo.”

“Ah, actually -” Huey’s voice always quivers a bit when he asserts himself. You often wonder how he manages to get a word in edgewise with Strangelove. “We’ve been working on a method to reliably recycle ammunition. The brass casing can be reused, or melted down, and gunpowder has proven to be a perfect additive for fertilizer.”

Kaz’s eyebrows rise, genuinely impressed. “Huh. Y’know, we _have_ been talking about expanding the greenhouse - whaddaya think?”

You lean over to read the clipboard - the money R&D is asking for this experiment would have sent Kaz into conniptions just six months ago. “I don’t see why not. It’s practical, and it’s not like there’s any other use for defunct ammo.”

“Yeah. Well -” he laughs. “- short of fleecing local militias still stuck with old tech by undercutting the black market price.”

“Kaz…”

“Oh, lighten up Boss. We’re done doing the CIA and KGB’s work for them. Becoming self-sufficient is our biggest priority right now, and this is a step in the right direction.” Kaz hands the clipboard back to Eagle Eye, his smile almost blinding. “Good work.”

Eagle Eye is a large man - wide-chested, top-heavy, sporting a grey-flecked moustache and a scar down his neck from Vietnam that took half his ear. Still, he stands straighter under Commander Miller’s effortless praise. This is one of the most useful things about Kaz: he’s freer with flattery in a way that bolsters your authority rather than competing with it. The men understand that he operates with your trust and approval. He keeps morale up without ever cheapening the value of your own input.

He dismisses the R&D staff and hangs back to fill you in on the day’s reports. You’ve been stuck at the firing range all morning and afternoon helping run defense drills with the on-base staff. Kaz convinced you to give the research team some time off before ZEKE’s operational trials begin, so it’s just you and him left on the strut, tossing shop-talk back and forth while the shadow of Metal Gear’s hangar gets longer. As the conversation lulls, you fiddle with the pocket you keep your cigars in and Kaz tugs at the place where his scarf is knotted. He’s wearing it a little bit higher than usual today.

“Uh, listen,” he says, voice thick. “About last night...”

You look at him. It’s not like Kaz to bring up this aspect of your relationship unless pressed. He shucks off his sunglasses and presses his hand over his eyes.

“Snake, look, I… I thought it through, and you’re right.” He swallows hard. “It’s us.” 

You don’t say anything, wait until he uncovers his eyes. They’re so blue that even in a hazy caribbean evening that it’s like a pinch of copper chloride dropped into a glass of water. 

“You and me,” he continues, “- and the MSF. That’s what’s important to me. But we won’t get anywhere if you can’t trust me, so I’ll knock it off, okay? The female staff don’t have to worry about me being in their hair all the time anymore. I’ll keep my hands - and my dick - to myself for a while.”

“That promise extend to Miss Caminades?” you wonder lightly.

Both his chuckle and his rakish grin are extremely forced. “What? C’mon, I’m only human. And isn’t she technically a civilian?”

You raise an eyebrow and he loses what little steam he had. “Er…” He twists his sunglasses between thumb and forefinger. “J-just a little joke, Boss.”

“Kaz,” you say quietly. He sucks in a breath and doesn’t let it back out. You take a step forward and start to undo his scarf. His exhale follows the motion of the fabric as you slide it off his neck and expose the dark bruises you made there last night with your mouth and teeth. Kaz has the kind of skin that holds a suntan much longer than a bruise - it’s a challenge to make a mark that sticks. The noises he makes when you do are always interesting.

You run a gentle thumb across his throat, then take his chin in your palm and force him to meet your gaze. “Kaz,” you say again. “I do trust you.”

Kaz looks a little like a dying man given a drop of water. How much clearer can you make it? He’s proved his competence a hundred times over. 

He nods, and digs at the corner of his left eye with a knuckle. Then he does something unexpected and leans his mouth into your palm, where he lays a soft and oddly restrained kiss at the center of your palm.

“Thanks, Boss,” he whispers. “Glad to be with you.”

He turns his back to you when he does his scarf back up. That strikes you as strange, but you don’t think about it for very long. Kaz couldn’t hide anything from you even if he wanted to.

A minute later he’s all done up again - his clothes _and_ his attitude. “Don’t forget about performance evaluations tomorrow. Seven AM sharp!”

You know; you do this every last Friday of the month. “Kaz, I’m not that old yet.”

“You say that now, but time’ll catch up with you before you know it, Boss.”

He wheels off with a jaunty salute and a spring to his step. You have no plans for the evening, a rare luxury after spending weeks debriefing members of the Intel team almost every night. You’ve got no idea what to do with all the free time. Kaz took to Mother Base immediately, but many of the things that make it a smart investment - defensible, broad sight lines, shadows that only come out when the sun’s on the horizon - make you uneasy. There are days when you can’t stop thinking of the place in blueprints, in tactical terms: your eye always sweeping the deck for places to hide and _wait_. But Kaz was also right that the men are sure as hell happier here than they were sleeping in the jungle. The MSF’s qualified technical staff has tripled in half a year.

There are footsteps behind you. Your fingers twitch, but you don’t reach for your knife. There’s no one here who wants to hurt you.

“Funny,” says Strangelove, stepping out from the stairwell awning with the grace of a ghost. “You professed such authentic ignorance when I explained to you that I was a lesbian.”

You give her a wary side-eye as you slide out a cigar and lighter. You’re still not sure how to talk to her; she wants things from you that you can’t give. _Click, click, click_. “Odd way to open a conversation, Doctor.”

Her lab-coat is a size too big. When she goes to adjust her sunglasses, her sleeve pools at the elbow. _Click, click_. “Unfortunately for you, I witnessed that entire exchange with Commander Miller.”

“Oh,” you say and the flint sparks. You pull in a breath to light the cigar. She _would_ interpret it that way. On exhale, you add: “It’s not the same thing.”

Her expression does not change. “Isn’t it?” she asks lightly, tilting her head towards where Kaz disappeared. “He’s in love with you.”

“Hmph. Tell him that. Kaz would say - _heh_ \- that you’re being melodramatic.” Kaz accuses you of being melodramatic every time you question a minor budgetary adjustment.

She sets a knuckle to her chin. “Do _you_ think I’m being melodramatic?”

“I think you’re misjudging the situation. Kaz and I aren’t -”

“Lovers?” she demands crisply.

“It doesn’t matter if we are.”

“I see,” - and she scoffs. “Well - I suppose you _are_ both men after all.”

You bristle at that implication. Strangelove has beliefs about gender that are inconsistent with your experience. “That doesn’t matter either. We met on the battlefield; Kaz and I understand each other as soldiers.”

Strangelove’s mouth goes tight. Her shades are completely opaque- you can’t see her eyes, but the rest of her expression is diamond sharp. She takes a step forward, close enough that she could touch you if she reached out. “Is that what _she_ taught you?” Her voice sounds like glass about to be dropped. You square your shoulders and -

\- _standing in that field as white petals whipped around your ankles. She calls the COBRA unit her family. "I may no longer be able to bear children, but I still have them." She had you. Orphans of the 20th Century, abandoned by the times, bleeding together, breathing together; you didn’t understand what she really meant until Kaz pulled that grenade on you in Colombia. You could have laughed - it was so absurd that such a brilliant man should die by your hand, left in an unmarked grave because of an arbitrary signature on a piece of paper._

_You tried to put a blade through her trachea when you first met, but she took your hand between both her palms and showed you how to do better._

“Why...” Strangelove whispers. You snap aware, realize that your cigar has burnt down to the butt, embers brushing the fabric of your gloves. When you take a step back, she follows. “Why don’t you ask me about her?

“I already know everything I need to know about her.”

“What, exactly, is that supposed to mean?”

_You -_

You press your fingers to your temple, are surprised to find it bare. Strangelove is relentless. She takes another step towards you, backs you into a corner. Mother Base has broad sight lines, nowhere to hide - a civilian who barely comes up to your shoulder shouldn’t be able to box you in like this. “You told me once that she declined to tell you about her personal life.”

“She told me everything that matters.”

_She gave her body and her child to her country, carried her scar as proof. You carried her scar with you, keep her child close: not physically, but in the only way that matters. Adam keeps your secrets for you, even from himself. The only other person you trusted like that -_

“If I were you, if I met someone who… who grasped a part of her heart that was held secret from me -” Strangelove clutches her chest, throat bobbing the way it does when someone cries, but her countenance is rigidly controlled. “Well,” she says bitterly. “You know exactly what I would do.”

“What? Want me to torture you, Strangelove? Afraid my methods won’t heal so cleanly.”

“Is that another thing she taught you?”

“Yeah. Do you want to know how?”

_She only peels your nail all the way off once - left hand, index. Grabs your chin when she notices how far away you’ve gone. Stay with me, Jack. It took five and half months for the new nail to reach the distal edge; she expected your shooting range averages to be back within the margin of error of your best after two weeks._

“Yes,” Strangelove replies hungrily.

You push of the wall and move past her. “You really don’t.”

She’s at your heels. “I’m not afraid of who she was. Why are you?”

You grit your teeth so hard they squeak, hands closing around the strut’s safety railing. The evening turns the water black, black, black - everywhere except where the waves break white against the oil rig’s legs, churning up foam between the steel beams. You’re not. You -

“Don’t you want to know what she was like as a child?”

“Doctor…” your voice is so quiet you can barely hear it. Strangelove’s shadow dances warped over the railing slats.

“She has a single photo of herself from that time -” she says softly. “I’ve seen it. Cut out of a larger black and white portrait. You can see the gate of a manor hall in the background. She must have been ten years old in the picture, so: after the stock market crash, and yet her dress looks brand new. She told me once that she was rebellious as a child, that her parents were very old fashioned but she… oh, that she was already throwing boys twice her size in the dirt by the time she was school aged. That’s why she loved to fight even though she personally abhorred violence.”

 _Rebellious;_ you remember her stepping on your hand when you reached for am M-unit on your first intermittent fast. _I can see you brute forced your way through boot-camp_ , she told you with a quirk to her lips. Said you had a natural eye for this, a natural hand, but that you’d end up dead or dishonourably discharged the way you were going. Most men require a little discipline, she said, but there are others like you. Men for whom it is necessary to maintain strict discipline at all times. And Strangelove calles her _rebelliou -_

“That’s not -” You lean over the rail. She taught you all your life not to question anything you were told. The last thing she ever did was pull that lesson out from under you. Her duty was everything to her, wasn’t it? But -

\- aren’t you a rebel now?

Strangelove is still talking, but all you can hear is white noise, like the sound of the ocean is racing towards the sky and sweeping you along with it. You respond - have no idea what you said except that Strangelove seems offended by it and takes a shocked step backwards, beneath the awning of the strut’s second level. She’s careful not to step into the sun unless she’s brought an umbrella with her, but she followed you all the way out here into the searing, orange sunset.

“ - I _loved_ her,” is what Strangelove is saying. There are white petals stuck in your eyes, like they’re glued to your flesh. _But you didn’t know her._

_Which one of you didn’t know her?_

_Fighting came naturally to you. Of course - it’s just survival instinct. Size and training and weaponry can only carry you so far: most of the time, the one who wins a fight to the death is the person who wants to live more. That’s the only reason you were able to defeat her. But she still makes you fight for your life. It takes less than a second between when you pull the trigger and when the bullet clears the muzzle. That’s enough time for her to swerve and roll. She’s in your face by the time the kickback ends._

_Why_

_Why’d you disappear on me all of a sudden._

: You didn’t need me anymore.

_But there were still so many things I wanted you to teach me._

: You know how to fight Jack, you’re one of the best, but I can’t teach you how to think.

_A chop to the wrist disarms you. A hand wrapped just below the anterior elbow brings you to the ground._

: You haven’t learned anything these past five years. I still know everything about you.

_A boot to the chest keeps you there, sinks you into the soft belly of the flowerbed._

_Well, I don’t know anything about you._

: What’s that supposed to mean?

_You do know some things. You know that the weight of the Patriot favours a sweep left. You know that she knows that you know, so she’ll sweep right. You roll to your right instead, landing facedown in a sea of white petals as her bullets rip through the field like heavy machinery tearing up a quarry. They kick up a wall of dirt and blossoms that blinds you temporarily, nothing but light and dark - a tunnel that narrows the closer you get to the exit. You -_

\- come to gently, your vision all white and gold, the scent of antiseptic and fruit falling around you in waves. It’s Paz - cradling you in her lap as she holds a stethoscope to your breastbone, your Senior Medic at her side.

“- is stable,” he’s saying. You’re staring at Paz’s hair, which is stained red by the halogen safety lights below. There’s a petal resting in one of her curls. Without thinking, you reach up and pinch it out of the air. It disappears between your fingers, and Paz’s free hand drifts up to rest in the place you touched. 

“Snake’s awake,” she gasps. “Boss!” shouts the Medic.

You try to sit up, but he pushes you back down. “Boss, hold up. Let me check your eyes -”

“I’m fine,” you grunt. 

“Wait, wait - lemme see him.” Kaz appears, leaning a casual hand on Paz’s shoulder so he can examine you. She bristles when he touches her. “Snake, what the hell happened?” 

You have no idea. The Medic starts to explain something - Doctor Strangelove called for him, said you passed out suddenly. Of course she couldn’t move you herself: you’re a big guy. She’s still here - resting against a steel beam with her arms crossed at the waist. Conversation dulls around you as your gaze catches hers. She reaches up to carefully tip her sunglasses - this is the first time you’ve ever seen her eyes. They’re pale and milky, like a corpse’s, but knife-bright. In that moment, you understand her: Strangelove isn’t the kind of person who would say sorry if she doesn’t mean it, and neither are you.

She pushes her glasses back up by the bridge, then disappears around the corner into her lab.

“- untreated post-concussion syndrome,” the Medic is saying. “I think he should spend a night in the infirmary, so I could -”

Everything’s so bright. You massage your forehead, are surprised to find it bare-

“No,” you say.

“Boss…”

You push Paz aside and roll onto your elbows. After that, the world begins to spin.

“Boss,” the Medic repeats. “You probably have vertigo. You should let me -”

“Kaz,” you growl, and he practically snaps to attention. “I’m not going to sickbay.”

He gets it immediately. With a thin smile, he shoves the Medic aside and helps yank you to your feet. “You heard the man,” he chirps, slinging his arm around your waist. “Don’t worry about it, I got him.”

“But, Commander Miller -”

“That’s right,” and there’s a blade in Kaz’s voice you don’t get to hear often. “It’s the Commander’s orders.”

They let him take you. Paz watches until you get to the end of the stairwell, her mouth pressed tightly shut with a measure of calculation that seems unnaturally harsh on her round face. Strange.

“I honestly can’t believe you sometimes,” Kaz is muttering as he fumbles with your quarter’s lock. He does love to complain. You spent the walk staring out at the ocean and seeing nothing but the sunset flooding a while field red. You don’t remember anything else. You’re thinking about Strangelove: her behaviour strikes you as pathetic, conflating her relationship with your mentor with yours. Her definition of love is convoluted and shallow. You were forced to submit yourself utterly to _her_ , and because of that, you gained everything: a skillset, a profession, a philosophy. Strangelove submit herself willingly and carries nothing with her but pain. If that’s what she believes love is...

“... Snake.”

Kaz is still in your room with you and you didn’t notice. Should have marked the direction of his footsteps; it’s easy to know by sound alone whether someone has stepped into or out of a room. Instead, you’re leaning over your desk with your face buried in one hand, sweat streaming down your temples. You don’t feel it. You never feel it - that’s another thing she taught you. Instead, you just go away. It’s easy; you spend most of your time away. 

Men like you need to be in control all the time, otherwise -

“What do you want, Kaz?”

“Really?” 

You take a deep breath and turn around. “Yeah, really.”

He sighs and takes his sunglasses off, rubbing his eyes with the heel of his palm before clipping them in the collar of his shirt. “No offense, Boss? But you’ve been acting weird as fuck these last few months. Would you tell me what the hell’s going on already.”

“Nothing’s “going on”.”

“Seriously, Snake, you sleepwalk your way through another staff meeting and fifteen minutes later I hear that you’ve passed out on deck? I… _we_ -” he makes a frustrated noise, and an even more frustrated hand gesture. “… do you any idea what’s going on right now? We’re less than a week away from launching a series of tests for a highly experimental weapon that we’ve sunk over a mil USD into because, if we’re not careful, we’re one bad day from waking up with Langley's foot all the way up our asses and _you’re_ \- I mean, this is a time of critical growth for the MSF, Snake, you need to at least _look_ like you’re holding together, or the men are going to lose faith.”

“You followed me in here to fuss about finances?”

He drops his hand, eyes wide. “No.”

“Then what is it?”

“Can’t you just… tell me what you’re thinking?”

You narrow your eye. “I tell you what I’m thinking.” 

Kaz doesn’t like this answer. “Like hell you do!” he spits. “Don’t feed me that crap right now - I’m not in the mood.”

You toss you head to one side. “What, you think I hold back?” In fact, you have never censored yourself with Kaz.

“Sure, okay, not when you’ve got a fucking opinion about my rifle grip or budget cuts, but otherwise? Yeah - I think you hold back, Boss.” He hesitates. “Look, after Peace Walker -”

“ _Kaz_ -”

“Snake, I get why you are the way you are and I don’t hold it against you. When it comes down to it, I barely know anything about you. But sometimes you just tell me shit that -” he flexes his hand in and out of a fist uselessly a few times. “ - am I supposed to listen to all that, and then what? Forget you said anything? Not care? After everything we’ve been through?”

You just stare at him.

“Things are going great for us right now and I don’t mind picking up the slack once in a while, but it’s not always going to be like this. You scared the shit out of me, you know - back at Lake Cocibolca? For a minute there I seriously thought you were going to… to just _take off_ and -” his voice gets smaller. “- and leave me alone. T-to do all this alone. I thought -” He rests his forehead in his palm again for a moment. “Honestly, you might as well have. I’m doing the best I can, Snake, but you’re just not - not _here_.”

He has no idea what he’s asking.

“You don’t want me to be here more than I already am, Kaz.”

“... what the hell does that mean?”

“I -” you take a step and stumble. The room spins around you and when you open your eyes again you’re on the floor, laid out on your side with your right arm pinned underneath you at awkward angle. When did you pass out again? The overhead lights have been turned off and someone is resting a hand on your head.

“ _Woah_ there, Snake. Careful - the last thing we need is for you to hit your head again.”

Your free hand snaps up to grab Kaz by the wrist. He’s sitting cross-legged on the floor with your head resting on his thigh. Everything else in the room is a blur.

“What…” Your voice feels raw and sharp in your throat. “What… happened?”

“Same thing I imagined happened back on the R&D strut - you tripped over your own damn feet.” He forces himself to laugh. “You’re losing your touch.”

You let go of his wrist. His hand relaxes in your hair; fingers spread, then retract. He does that, over and over again, not saying anything. It’s unusual for Kaz to keep his mouth shut for one whole minute, let alone several.

“... having fun playing nursemaid?”

“You know, my mom used to pass out suddenly like that too. She was always trying to hide how sick she was, but everyone knew. For a long time, I was too small to move her so I just made her lay like this.” He laughs genuinely this time, even though it’s an unhappy memory. “She was even more stubborn than you. I told her I was just returning a favour. You know how I told you that when I was kid I would get in fights all the time, right? Sometimes even with adults. Every time I got my ass kicked, mom would read me the riot act of course, but then she’d hold me just like this and clean my ears.”

“Clean your ears?”

“Yeah. I guess that sounds pretty weird to a Westerner, but in Japan cleaning someone’s ears for them is a pretty big sign of trust and affection.”

“Makes sense. I wouldn’t let just anyone put a finger in there.”

“You don’t use your hands, Snake, Jesus. There’s a special tool called a _mimikaki_ designed to scoop the wax out gently. Ha -” he lets out a shaky breath. “I used to kick up a huge fuss whenever she took out the ear pick because I hated it when she babied me, but now… I kinda miss it.”

You shut your eyes and focus on the feeling of Kaz’s hands in your hair. He has long, narrow fingers, which makes him a natural with a Beretta. He was using a standard M1911 when you met him.

“During my survival training,” you begin haltingly. “The Boss took me with her during an Op in KMT Myanmar, along the border of Yunnan province. She abandoned me in the woods for seventy-two hours with nothing but a knife and the clothes on my back.”

“She let you keep your shirt? That’s a shock.”

“If it makes you feel better I lost it falling out of a magnolia tree. Got my left boot stuck in a crag under swamp water too. Also: came back with a brutal case of rhabdomyolysis.” 

“Damn, Boss, that must’ve been some fall.”

“It wasn’t from an injury. I ate a bad mushroom.”

Kaz makes a noise like he’s trying to stop himself from laughing. “Right. Of course you did.”

“I was taught foraging in Korea and slept on the flight over China instead of reading the field guide I was given. Mistook a Russula Subnigricans for a Russula Virescens.”

“ _Nisekurohatsu_ ,” Kaz says.

“Hm?”

“It’s what we call the Russula Subnigricans in Japan. It means _fake black heart_ . It looks almost identical to black brittlegill, except that it turns red when you cut it open instead of black.” He lets out a soft, chiding breath - this is the sound he makes when he thinks something you’ve told him is outrageous. “You really do have a constitution of steel. Over 50% of people who accidentally eat a _Nisekurohatsu_ die from it.”

“I almost did. I had no idea what was wrong with me. I was delirious, could barely lift my M1; it was the first time in my life I thought I might not make it. The Boss’s men had no idea who I was, and I was half-raving mad with fever. To them I must’ve looked like a lunatic. If she hadn’t intervened when she did, they would have shot me where I stood.”

“Snake…”

“They nearly did too. She broke one of the scout’s wrist in two places to save my skin. I passed out at her feet. But -” with your eyes closed, you can almost feel her hand close around your bicep to drag you to your feet “- she took care of me.”

“Did she clean your ears for you?” Kaz asks, and you can hear his smile.

“No. She slapped me awake, then grabbed a bag of intravenous fluids from her unit’s medic and made me put in the IV myself.”

Kaz doesn’t say anything to that. He’s stopped massaging your temples and is just sitting there with his hand cupped lightly around the curve of your skull. You roll onto your back to see his mouth pulled down into a pinched, miserable expression. He startles when he notices you staring back.

“Happy now?” you wonder.

“What?”

“You said you barely knew anything about me.”

His expression twists like he’s in physical pain. A moment after that, he smiles, but it doesn’t reach his eyes. He flicks you in the back of the head without intent to harm. “Hey, Boss, why don’t you go the fuck to sleep already?”

“... like... this?”

“Do you…” he swallows hard. “Want me to leave?”

You close your eyes. “... you can stay long as you promise not to stick anything in my ear.”

Kaz flicks you again, then slides an arm under your head to cushion it. You nearly do fall asleep like that - a dark, dreamless sleep. At the edge of it, Kaz’s voice calls you back again.

“Uh... actually -”

You’re too tired to come back from the brink. You murmur an affirmative, have no idea if he heard you.

“I... I have to… tell you something.”

His voice sounds like gravel.

“About Paz.”

IV.

Paz sits across from you in the helicopter, hitched up so that her skinny knees are drawn together and her boots are just grazing the chopper pallet. She’s got her nose buried in a thick autobiography of Franz Jägerstätter, but she spends the better part of the three hour trip watching you over the top of the book with her wide, glassy eyes . You catch her turning a page without even looking at it.

“Good book?” you wonder.

She keeps it held aloft when she speaks, hiding her mouth. “Yes,” she replies, “although it is also very sad. Hehr Jägerstätter was called a religious fanatic for refusing to join the Wehrmacht, but I can see no other moral recourse. I think he was the only sane man in Austria.”

“Well, that’s easy to say in retrospect, Paz.” It’s incredible how simple things seem when viewed through her eyes. 

“What would you have done in his place?” she asks.

You set your elbows on your knees and rest your chin on your entwined hands. Outside, the sunlight clips along the surface of the water. “You mean if I was born in Germany instead of America?”

“Yes. Would you have fought for the Nazis?”

“Hm. World War II was over by the time I signed up.”

“But -” Paz sets the book on her lap with a thump. “If it wasn’t?”

You examine her carefully. She’s wearing a simple khaki dress over her rain boots, white shawl drawn loose around her shoulders. It washes her out, like a polaroid photo dropped in soapy water. Kaz was right - there’s something off about her recently, as if she’s slowly wilting the longer you keep her around, a hot-house flower re-potted in fallow soil that’s only even needed to nourish weeds.

You answer her honestly: “I don’t know that I would’ve thought about it.”

“Snake,” Paz covers her mouth. “How can you say that?”

You lean back with a shrug. “Did you want me to lie and tell you I joined the military because I’m a good person, Paz?”

Her thin fingers tremble against the cover of the book. She doesn’t speak to you for the rest of the ride. She hangs back in Havana too, dragging her toes through the shallow puddles collected between grooves of the brick street. It was raining over Cuba a few hours back and the whole city smells like a watercolour painting looks: misty and crisp, water baking beneath the butter yellow morning light. Paz looks like a ghost against the backdrop of the brightly coloured baroque row-houses. You wait for the second chopper to arrive and pass her off to your Intel staff. Butterfly is the longest serving female soldier in the MSF - a widowed farmer from Bolivia: crack shot with a rifle, fluent in Spanish, English, Portuguese and Quechua. Too canny, middle aged and broad-shouldered to have ever fallen for Kaz’s antics. She sets a gentle hand on Paz’s head when she waves you off.

 _You’re_ here to do a little clean-up operation. Kaz acts like you’re on top of the world these days, but it seems like all you’ve done these past few months since Lago Cocibolca is _clean-up_ . _Starting to feel like a janitorial service instead of a private military_ , you think. If you made this point out loud to Kaz, he’d just cheekily hand you a mop and tell you things aren’t so clean and tidy off the CIA’s payroll, _Boss_ . A quarter after noon, you’re meeting a hefty American man in a seaside cafe over a plate of fried plantains and two glasses of _cuba libre_. He introduces himself as Jimmy “The Eyes” Kline, his pin-heavy lanyard jangling as he reaches over the table to shake your hand. You eye him up and down and try to light a cigar.

 _Click click_.

Unkempt beard, dark glasses, top-of-the-line camera… he’s wearing an authentic Red Army jacket circa 1942, but it’s a bit small on him. Doesn’t pull that tight in the shoulders, but he wouldn’t be able to button it past his navel. A month ago his UFO conspiracy rag published leaked photos of the Chrysalis prototype and he’s been sniffing around in your backyard ever since. You’ve got an envelope of doctored pictures that’ll lead him on a wild goose chase all the way back up to New Mexico where he came from. No idea why Kaz sent you to do something so simple. Usually he -

 _Click click_. “Is it true that you’re Big Boss?” 

Ah - that’s why.

 _Click click snap_ . The lighter flares up and you choose to answer with an enigmatic grin and an exhale of smoke. He’ll think what he wants: they always do. That’s what the title _Big Boss_ was designed to do.

His eyes spill out over the top of his spectacles like he’s just caught Santa Claus. After that, he believes everything you say to him. Takes the offered envelope like it’s made of gold. On the way out, he snaps a photo of you so you grab his camera, dismantle it and pocket the film.

“Wow,” he says. “I can’t believe the legendary Big Boss just broke my camera.”

You push through the gawking crowd and duck onto narrow side-street. Paz is waiting for you when you turn to corner.

You actually have to press your eye shut - rub it sore - to make sure she’s really there and you aren’t just seeing things. You’ve been -

\- _seeing_ things lately.

“Paz?”

Her back's to the west, face half-hidden in the shadow of her hair. She's standing with her hands folded at the small of her back, head tipped to the side, one leg pulled up behind the other so she can tap the toe of her boot against the pavement.

“How about that, Snake?” she sways, bounces from one foot to the other. “I managed to track _you_ down, and you did not even notice! Some stealth expert you are, hm?”

You set your cigar to lips, but don’t take a drag. “... I wasn’t exactly expecting to be followed.”

“Is that how it works for men like you? Spies must give each other advanced notice that they are following each other?” 

Good point. 

“What are you doing here, Paz? I thought I left you with Butterfly and the others.”

She tilts her head in the other direction, yellow curls spilling everywhere. “I did not come to Havana to be around Butterfly.” - then she vaults forward and hooks her arm around yours. “I came to be with _you_ , Snake.”

You look at where her hand is curled around your bicep. It’s very small and very pale; you barely feel it through the fabric of your drab even though it seems like she’s holding on pretty hard. Paz looks like a heavy breeze will do her in at the best of times, but today she’s acting like a piece of tissue paper hung out to dry. You suppose she’s safer with you than anywhere else. You dig out your radio with a sigh and flick it on.

“Butterfly? This is Snake.”

Butterfly swears in Spanish. “Boss, I have bad news. Paz, she -”

“She’s fine. I got her here with me. We’ll meet you back at the RV in two hours.”

Paz smiles at you - bright and uncomplicated. “Finally,” she says. “Now I have you all to myself.”

She leads you around Havana in near-silence, a watery smudge guiding you through foot traffic with her hand wrenched firmly in the fabric of your shirt. What are you supposed to say to her? She’s invested in her education, but you never went to school. She thinks about things in such lofty terms - environmental conservation, her nation’s place in the global community, the prevention of war. You only understand these things from a practical perspective. It’s easy to damage Paz emotionally just by telling her what you think, but she’s still eager for your opinion. You smoke your way through the rest of your cigar and watch the clouds roll north towards the Atlantic.

“What do you think of Havana?” she asks, peering into a grocer window with a finger to her lips.

Proof of triumph in the face of adversity. Humble and impoverished, refusing to buckle under US sanctions. There’s evidence here that the communist mode of production offers certain benefits capitalism doesn’t; the last time you were in an American city it could’ve split your head open. You remember America being quieter when you were kid. You -

What you _remember_ of being a kid, is -

“Where does the MSF go now?” she wonders, drinking guanabana juice through a straw.

You can’t think of the future yet, not when you’re still trying to play defense after using your voice where the DOD could hear it for the first time in four years.

“Commander Miller seems to have a lot of ideas about the future.”

Kaz is always thinking of the future. He’d hardly spend a minute in the present if you weren’t around to yank his head out of the clouds.

“Yet you only think of the present. Hm.” Paz stirs the sugary residue at the bottom of her glass, eyes downcast. “I suppose that is why the two of you work so well together.”

Maybe.

Along the seawall, Paz picks a sea-shell up off the sidewalk. It’s cracked down the middle, leaves a streak of shimmering chalk on her fingers when she sets it back down. “Will you help Amanda liberate her country?” she asks.

We’re not a charity service, Paz.

She twists her skirt between both hands. “Even though their cause is righteous?” 

All the more reason not to. We’d just be complicating things for them. Amanda’s nation has already been scarred irreparably by the actions of American mercenaries. You don’t want to become warmongers.

“What do you think of Amanda?”

She has the heart of the a true freedom fighter. She’ll fight to the end.

“What do you think of Miss Caminades?”

Smarter than she looks, easy to under-estimate.

“But do you think she’s pretty?”

You’d have to be blind not to notice Cécile is good looking.

“What do you think of me?”

You stop when you notice that Paz has fallen behind again. You turn to find her stalled at the back of the alley. It’s all afternoon shadows and white limestone around her, moisture from the moring rain dripping off the cloth eaves hung over the residential window panes. She’s crouched down, dragging a rock between the grooves of the brick road, upending sand, cigarette butts, all the glittering little shards of glass left by smashed beer bottles. There’s noise drifting above the rooftops - the clanging of bicycle bells, the sounds of men getting drunk before siesta, dogs barking - but the two of you are completely alone.

“Paz?”

She cranes her neck to look at you. “Do you think I’m pretty?”

To you, Paz looks like a lamb that’s lost its flock. Once you cracked a duck egg open to find a nearly grown chick inside. You held it in your palm as it struggled to breathe, watched it die without ever understanding it was alive, didn’t think about it again until right now. Your hesitation makes Paz impatient; she’s tapping her rock against the ground.

“I think you’ll be a beautiful woman, Paz.”

She tosses the rock behind her and rises to her feet, brushing dirt off her knees as she goes. “That is not what I asked,” she says, voice low and unfamiliar. “I _asked_ -” - she sways close and slides a palm over your stomach. “- if you think I’m pretty _now_ , Snake.” 

_Your automatic instinct is to -_

“Paz -”

Her hand drags down and hooks into your belt, anchoring her there as she pushes up on her toes. “I wouldn’t mind it,” she whispers. “If you thought I was already a beautiful woman.”

When her other hand comes up around your neck, you move without thinking about it. It goes in three parts: your fingers close around her wrist, your ankle hooks behind her heel and you slam her against the wall, hard. She gasps, then sucks the noise back in as her ribcage hits the limestone. Paz is so small and fragile that she drowns in your shadow. Her wrists are like brittle driftwood in your hands, shaking so hard she could snap herself in half. But she’s not afraid. Her bottom lip is pulled open - teeth scraping against the soft skin, her cheeks smudged red, delicate fingers curled into her palms, eyes on your mouth. She’s aroused, and she thinks you’re going to kiss her.

“Snake,” she murmurs, “you can touch me, you know.” She nudges her bare knee up along your inner thigh, right where you ground a boot-shaped bruise into Kaz’s leg two nights ago. “I won’t tell anyone. Not even if you -”

She has no idea what she’s asking. _You could -_

“- hurt me.”

Paz goes slack and crumples to the ground when you let her go. You don’t help her up. Her shadow staggers at the corner of your vision, all fractured and weightless where the sunlight filters through her hair. 

“Paz…” You shouldn’t look at her

“I’m… sorry.” 

“What was that all about?”

“Ah, that is… you see, Chico he -” her voice goes fluttery as she equivocates. “I think he means to make a dramatic confessions to me at… at Commander Miller’s party this weekend. I suppose I just wished to know what it was like before he tells me something foolish.”

_What it was like?_

“Yeah, well, I don’t think he’s quite ready for that, Paz -” 

Is that true? Kaz told you once that he lost his virginity around Chico’s age. He doesn’t tell the story like it’s a tragedy, but there are other things he’s confessed to you since that -

_You were about Paz's age the first time your mentor took you in her hand and finished you off. Wiped her hand off on your pants. “Do it yourself next time.”_

“- and neither are you. Besides - isn’t he a little young for you?”

“How old is Commander Miller?” she responds starchly. There’s something off about her tone. She -

“A lot too old.” You finally turn towards her.

“That’s not what I…” Paz’s eyes fixed on the ground. She’s rubbing a finger along her upper lip, looking lost. “Why is it that you like him so much?”

“Kaz?”

“Yes.” She presses down on her lip. “He seems to cause you as many problems as he solves. And just a few days ago, that awful fight -!”

You can’t help it - you chuckle. “Kaz and I fight to blow off steam. That’s just how we are - I wouldn’t worry about it.”

She looks at you with furious, blue eyes. “You like _that?_ You… the two of you! What is the point of such savage behaviour between. B-between -” she seems to struggle with the next word. “- best friends? _Why?_ ”

Winding Kaz up is like stoking a flame in the dead of winter, like spilling red paint all over a black and white photograph. Sometimes you forget what things taste like, the difference between hot and cold. You put yourself away in so many boxes, carefully stacked and itemized for easy access, but you don’t know how to open them anymore except one at a time. Kaz seems determined to kick them all open, acts like you’re dangling a key in front of him just out of reach, he’s so presumptuous. With him, you don’t have to hold back.

“It wouldn’t do any good to have a second in command who agreed with me all the time.”

She huffs - it’s not gentle, either. Paz tends to chide just as sweetly as she does anything else. A serious moral disagreement makes her sound sad more than anything - despaired that there was nothing to be done for you. But this? She’s judging you. Kaz said last night he thought she might be lonely, but that’s not how she looks to you now - one hand wrapped around her arm, nails digging crescents into her pale skin, the other picking at a gash on her knee from where you dropped her on the ground. She’s harried, erratic, jittering at the edges, neck damp with sweat. You could smell it when you had her against the wall - she isn’t lonely, she’s _terrified_. But -

“Paz, is something wrong?”

_\- what about?_

You set your palm on the wall and she flattens up against it again. 

“W-wrong? Ah, n-nothing is wrong…” She makes her eyes go wide, but suddenly you’re seeing things you didn’t notice before. Usually, an involuntary physical expression of shock is accompanied by several automatic physiological responses: an intake of breathe, a twitch in the limbs, the pulse quickening. Paz pulls her eyes open a half-second too late, as if part of a performance. “E-except,” she adds, hand drifting to her collarbone, “that I have just embarrassed myself terribly.”

 _Not you, then_ . _Something else_.

“No need to be embarrassed about a little crush, Paz. Everyone does things they regret around the person they like.”

If she takes umbrage with the way you described what just happened, it doesn’t show. That’s suspicious. Now that you’re thinking about it, her behaviour and her excuse contradict each other on every level. There’s nothing strange about a sixteen year old with sexual experience, but to pretend afterward that she’s more innocent than Chico? She knew what she was doing.

“Even you?” she asks quietly.

Oh yeah, you got taken for the biggest ride of all time on that front. “Yes, even me.”

Her gaze flutters away. Her expression is veiled beneath long, wheat-coloured eyelashes. “So... even you have a broken heart.”

Not broken. But you won’t fall for the same trick twice. “Paz, look -”

Her feet go out from beneath her before you can finish your sentence. You almost don’t catch her, but the thin noise that gurgles out of her nose sounds - 

\- _real._ “Oh no,” she rasps. She slaps a steadying hand on the wall, but you’ve got her by the shoulders. Her white knuckles press at numbly her forehead. “I think… that I have been out in the heat far too long. Snake, can you take me back to the helicopter? I need… I need to lay down for a bit.”

Did she learn that one from Strangelove? You feel Paz’s forehead to find it cool to the touch. Heat exhaustion makes the body clammy, but feels like a fever. It’s not hot enough out for it to have progressed to heat stroke. She’s obviously lying. Has been lying to you from the moment you stepped onto the chopper this morning. What is she playing at? She’s -

**_Stop._ **

What are you thinking? Paz is a normal teenager, caught in the throes of romantic drama. Your mistake was in treating her like an adult, making her think that she could interact with you physically as an adult as well. Ascribing the complex motives of an intelligence agent to her makes you sound paranoid, even inside your own head. Kaz was right - you’ve been spending too much time tangled up in there lately, you’re forgetting how to come back. You wrap a careful arm around Paz’s shoulder and maneuver her onto the street, towards the docks. You’ll talk to her again, straighten this all out. There will be plenty of time after Peace Day.

*

But Peace Day never -

  
  


V.

_One night before Peace Day:_

_Kaz is curiously sober for a Saturday night. Slams the tequila down like a peace offering. The smile he’s wearing is completely perfunctory, thoughtless; there’s light reflecting off his sunglasses, but you can tell that his expression doesn’t reach his eyes. He’s trying to tell you something important, but you aren’t listening. Tomorrow is Peace Day and he’s spent the last twelve hours making a nuisance of himself while you subjected yourself to a medical examination. You’re rolling an untouched beer between your palms just to hear the aluminum crinkle. Kaz is rapping his fingers across the table like he’s working up the courage to say something._

_You know how this one goes:_

_“Hey, Boss,” he says, popping the tequila open. “Wanna play ‘Never Have I Ever’?”_


	2. [DATE WITH EVA]

VI.

The night Kaz joined your cause, you stayed up until the crack of dawn talking. He told you about Polyani’s theories on market societies, about his own observations on the “Japanese Miracle”, Hubbert's Peak, the Vietnam War… some of these connections seemed spurious to you at the time, but you were impressed by the breadth of his vision.

 _“The future_ is _asymmetrical warfare - WWI created the oil industry, but pretty soon the oil industry will start fuelling war. Pretty hard to drum up patriotic sentiment around economic imperialism, think of how bad it’ll get if the US ends up in the Middle East. You think there’d be protests clogging up every campus in America if they were handling it through private contractors?”_

You agreed. Told him about your own borderless ethos. No creed, no flag, no ideology. He grinned and said: _“Y’know, Snake, you’re the only person I’ve ever talked to who gets it. Maybe it was fate we met like this, huh?”_

_“Hmph. Luck, maybe. I don’t believe in fate.”_

He pulled to his feet and brushed the grass off his pants. _“Yeah, well_ I _don’t believe in luck.”_

_“What do you believe in?”_

_“My own ingenuity and good looks. I learned when I was a kid that I had to make big things happen for myself or I was gonna spend the rest of my life eating shit from a gutter.”_

You pointed out that was pretty bold confidence coming from a man you’d nearly killed twice in one week.

 _“But you didn’t,”_ he replied.

His arrogance was breath-taking. Soon, he went about earning it. There was a week or two where you wondered if you’d made a tactical error, when he nearly takes your account into the red binge spending on non-essential amenities, like drip coffee and shaving cream. But a week after that, the men’s morning routine times have been cut in half and morale is up. _You gotta give a little to get a little, Boss_. You, unseriously, mused about the long-term consequences of turning your camp into a luxury hotel.

 _“Look, Boss, not everyone wants to live like -”_

_“Like what?”_

“Like you!” he gestures vaguely, waving his pipe around as he talks instead of smoking it. “Like _this_!”

“In a... jeep?”

Four months later you and Kaz are parked by a river halfway to the Brazilian border, waiting out a rainstorm. You’re here at his request, but he’s spent most of the day’s drive nagging your ear off to hire a dedicated mess staff on top of everything else.

“A jeep stuck in the mud, in the middle of who knows where -” the rain’s hitting the tarp so hard you can barely hear him when his voice cracks. “- _sleeping_ in a _cardboard box_!”

He pokes you, lightly, just above the knee. It’s part of the routine.

“In this line of work you have to be ready for anything, Kaz. I wouldn’t take anyone who can’t handle the conditions. The men have never complained.”

Kaz tips his shades down to make sure you can see how exasperated he is. “Boss, they don’t complain because you’re -” he pats your knee. “Well, _you_.”

You raise an eyebrow; he keeps going.

“You’re not just an ordinary soldier, Snake. These guys couldn’t _imagine_ coming to you with something this mundane. They’re -”

“Afraid of me?” you ask flatly. “Are you saying my men are scared to come to me with basic quality of life concerns?”

Kaz’s mouth twitches. He adjusts his sunglasses. “I’m saying that they want to live _up_ to you. Coming to you with complaints about the conditions would be admitting that they couldn’t live up to the standards you set. But you know who they _do_ complain to?”

He pats your knee again. This time, his hand stays there.

You snort, then take a drag off your cigar. “Funny.”

“What?”

“Here I thought I’d hired an X.O. - not a gossiping secretary.”

His hand clenches around your knee - knuckles red in the haze of the mosquito-light - but he laughs it off. “Well,” he says breezily, “I’ll be whatever you need as long as you let me expand the mess budget.” His hand crawls a half inch up your thigh.

You’ve known Kazuhira Miller for just over a hundred days; he has been trying to seduce you for a non-insignificant number of them now. Only recently has it become a problem. You should handle it before São Paulo, but you’re not sure how.

You ignore his hand and take another drag off your cigar. “I’ll rethink it,” you say finally. Kaz was right about the shaving cream, and there’s a few things you could do with a cook besides meals and rations.

He brightens up. “Thanks, Boss! You made the right choice.”

“Hmph, rich of you to say that after you nagged me about it for six hours.”

He throws you for a swerve by responding: “Snake, why _do_ you live like this?”

His voice has gone soft. _Sincere_ \- well: Kaz has this habit, this quirk, where his persona is a switch he turns on and off sometimes; _work’s over, office’s closed_ . Mostly on purpose, but you’ve knocked it off by accident plenty of times. You’ve never seen him do this with anyone else, but you have no way to confirm that. You have no way to confirm anything he tells you, really, you just have to trust it. Which you do - no enemy of yours would send a charm agent who got on your nerves _this_ much. 

His hand is still on your leg.

“I don’t really think about it,” you admit.

“What does that mean?” The rain has gotten louder, so Kaz has moved closer. His eyes are hidden from you in the darkness. “Didn’t you ever have… a… you know, normal life?”

It should be easy to dismiss Kaz’s motives and sincerity; you’ve _seen_ how he is with women. But that’s not it. There’s something else -

Your cigar has burnt down to embers. You stub it out on the side of the jeep, where it hisses in the rain. “I don’t remember.”

“What?”

You tap the side of your head with two fingers. “I got a concussion in Korea so bad that when I woke up, I’d forgotten half my life. I must have had a traumatic head injury as a child as well, to compound that badly.”

Kaz is paying attention now. “ _Snake_ ,” he says, so quietly the storm nearly drowns it out.

“I got lucky - no lingering cognitive symptoms. I was hit by the blowback of a mine - a lot of guys in my position went home with shrapnel in their head.”

“ _Lucky?_ Christ, Snake -” He shifts so that’s he’s leaning over you, hand riding up your inseam. “How can you say that?” He’s never been this bold. He sparred you eight rounds yesterday morning; it was raining then too and you held him face down in the mud until he started dry heaving. You had to drown him to make yield and he still rolled right over and chirped: _Wanna go nine for nine, Boss?_

The Japanese have a saying that if you fall down seven times, you get up eight. Kaz seems like the kind of man who will keep getting up until he dies. He’s remarkably bad at picking his battles so you can’t quite say you admire it, but you do like being around it. The only reason you continue to move forward is because your body does it automatically. There’s no meaning in it anymore. Kaz - he knows why he gets up, even if he can’t always tell you why he fell down in the first place. So: you knock him down, just to watch him do it all over again. And every time you do, he gives you a look that makes you think you’re missing out on half the equation here. 

“I’ve never had to say it before,” you admit. “You’re the first person I’ve ever told about that.” You haven’t thought about it for years, but Kaz has told you a few things about his childhood. He -

\- blinks, genuinely shocked. “Seriously?”

You let him sway into your space; trail a thumb up his cheekbone and slowly push back his sunglasses. You’re not sure what you actually want to do to him. You feel like you won’t know until you do it. 

He squints in the half-light, but doesn’t pull his shades back on.

“Most people I do drinks and dinner with learned my life’s story from a military file.” That world seems so far away, here in the pitch black rainforest. The jeep lit by the dying mosquito light, the rain misting all around you, bouncing off the roof loud as golf balls hitting tin. Kaz smells awful - he always over-applies cologne when he knows he’s going to sweat a lot. Was he planning this from the start? _Cute_.

His hand slides up your neck and you let him play this his way for a bit. His eyes are like glass in the dim, orange light. He’s handsome - too handsome for his own good, if you’re being honest - but what you like is the way he moves. There’s three layers to everything Kaz does: the performance, the insecurity that drives the performance, and the primal creature underneath - the man who once asked you to cut off his head. The way the light clings to his sclera, the roughness of his palm against your throat, these are the things that keep you watching.

“Snake… I never realized before, but you’re actually really lonely, aren’t you?” He cups your face. His skin is cooler than yours, and damp from the thick evening air. 

“You think so?” Your noses bump against each other - 

“Yeah, I -” and you grab his wrist the moment his hand grazes your cock. _“-wagh!”_

You twist to pin him against the seat; the whole jeep shudders beneath you. “Okay. Enough playing around, Kaz. What do you want?”

He tilts his head to the side, then nudges a knee up between your legs and laughs crookedly. “Looks I should be asking you the same thing.”

You wrench his arm and watch his eyebrow twitch. In the mud yesterday, he looked at you the same way. You weren’t sure what you wanted to do to him then either. His eyes are bright in the flickering lamp light. Every flash plunges you into total darkness, but you can feel Kaz trembling beneath you. He’s _excited_.

“Touch yourself,” you tell him. 

“Uhh...” He tries to sound put-upon, but you _saw_ how hard he swallowed. “You’ve kinda got my good hand there, Boss.”

You squeeze his wrist tighter. “I know. Aren’t you supposed to be resourceful?”

There it is: something flashes through his eyes - for a moment he’s so furious with you that he can barely breathe, but his pupils have gone wide enough they’re eating all the light out of his eyes. He nods, trailing teeth along his lower lip before his mouth cracks open. You force his legs apart with your knee. Nestle a hand in the crook of his neck and lean close enough that you can hear his ragged breathing over the pounding rainstorm.

He makes a great show of trailing his hand down his torso with a lurid hesitation, but you hold eye contact as he unzips. You force him to _look_ at you.

“If you wanted a show,” his breath hitches as he takes himself in hand. “Y-you just had to ask.”

You run your thumb up and down the length of his Adam’s Apple to feel the way it bobs in time with each tug of his wrist. His eyes flutter shut and he moans prettily, which frustrates you for some reason.

You close your hand around his throat and that moan turns into a very undignified squawk. “I don’t want a performance, Kaz,” you growl. “I’m not interested in the face you show other people.”

His eyes fall open again. _Slowly_. You press harder; the angle is unusual, but you’ve done this so many times it’s like operating a machine. Kaz can still breathe, if he really wants to work for it. It’s amazing, the things a human body can survive if it has the will to do it.

“If I wanted to know how you are with women, there are easier ways to find out.”

Now he’s _really_ looking at you. He seems a little uncertain as he starts pumping again, but he gets into an easy rhythm soon. The cab of the jeep fills with the slick sound of his palm working over his cock, the acrid scent of precome mixing with his cologne. He’s almost shy with your gaze boring into him, keeps trying to glance away, to turn his head, but your grip on his neck has locked his jaw in place. You can tell he wants you to look at his dick, but you don’t think you’ll give him that courtesy just yet.

“Are you -” he pants, “- j-just gonna look at me… like that… the whole time?”

You don’t blink. “Yes.”

“ _Fuck_ ,” he groans, and picks up the pace.

Kaz has dark eyebrows, but his lashes are so blonde they catch the light like moisture. The way they flutter in staccato with his pulse, against the beat of his moans, reminds you of being inside Eva. But you could never get her to drop the act, not all the way. She didn’t know how, even if she wanted to - and you never got the impression that she really wanted to. Kaz is begging to be peeled open with the burning insistence of a hangnail. You squeeze tighter, roll your palm to indent the trachea. His head lolls back and he chokes out your code-name as he climaxes on that messy exhale, almost noiselessly, his back arched and his come-slick hand clawing at where your fingers are clenched vise-tight around his throat. You hold him like that until he’s ridden out the aftershocks; that’s when he starts to panic.

He rolls out of the jeep coughing when you finally let him go. You light a cigar and listen to him vomit in the mud. When he comes back - looking like a drowned rat - he braces his hands on either side of the cab, just breathing, then looks straight at you and asks: “What the _hell_ , Snake?”

You grin around the butt of your cigar. “Not what you were expecting?”

He stares at you like you’re insane, but he gets back in the jeep. You blow a cloud of smoke towards him and he waves it off irritably. “You’re something else, you know that? You really are.”

“Speak for yourself.”

His glasses are still pushed up into his hair so you can see how wide his eyes get when he thinks what you’ve said is _“really something else”_.

“Kaz, you didn’t think this through, did you?” He keeps staring, so you ask directly: “What did you think was going to happen?”

“What did I… Wh-what di… what kinda question is that!?”

“A direct one.”

That gets him going - waving his hands around, sputtering. “I don’t fucking know! I - I thought that you’d either punch me in the face, or let me suck your dick! Forget sleeping in a cardboard box, do you have _any_ idea how the real world works?”

You fold your arms behind your head and lean back, cigar tucked at the corner of your mouth. “Like I said: you didn’t think it through.”

“I’m sorry, Boss, are you pulling my leg right now, or are you actually trying to turn this into a teaching moment?”

“You tell me.”

“ _Jesus_ ,” he says under his breath. He sighs through his nose and turns the radio on. Dusty Springfield booms from the speaker, too loud to talk over. But you don’t miss the way his eyes rove up and down your body when he thinks you’re not looking anymore. The way he’s tracking your hands; no longer calculating, but _hungry_. You roll the cigar from one end of your mouth to the other and watch him lick his lips. 

VII.

São Paulo rises from the arid mists, a concrete jungle carved from the bones of the Amazon. The last time you were in a city this big David was forcing you to toast a crystal glass of his ten thousand dollar champagne, the skyline of Paris lit up all around you. Anderson looked uncomfortable being expected to drink something that cost more than his college tuition. Doctor Clark laughed so hard at the way you were holding your glass that she snorted a mouthful of it up her nose and started coughing. Adam looked - as ever - absurdly at home wherever he went. Eva was at your side - her hair shorn short, still gaining muscle back from her ordeals in Hanoi, a wound healing shut across her chest. She looked comfortable - like she belonged in that world. David said you wore it like an ill-fitting suit. At that moment you felt naked.

Kaz is in his natural element here: schmoozing it up at the card table with his tacky polyester shirt buttoned halfway down to the navel and a filtered cigarette tucked performatively behind his ear. The casino is a wash of neon and noise; everyone stinks of sunscreen, cologne and stale smoke. Behind you: the slot machines are screeching, dice clacking as they rattle down the craps table, a bevy of waitresses in sheer cocktail dresses ferry drinks and sizzling plates of finger food in and out of the kitchen. Raunchy conversation floats above the chaos in a mixture of Portugese and Spanish. Everyone says brand names in English, pinching their left nostrils shut as they take a whiff of cocaine, licking the skin between thumb and forefinger to clean it up. You keep scratching your ear to check your blindspot, case the room: if something goes wrong, there’s no clear through-line to the exit. West, there’s a window - floor to ceiling - but you can’t say where it leads. Better to make for the kitchen, take your chances in the service tunnels. They checked your gun at the door, but you’ve made do with a knife in worse situations. If something _does_ go wrong -

 _‘Nothing will go wrong!’_ Kaz promised. Chided, really, as he dipped forward to pop the collar on the button-up shirt he made you wear, absolutely drenched in the scent of hair spray. _‘Look - this is the shit I’m good at, so let me handle everything. You just stand there and, uh -_ ” he thumped you in the chest and laughed. “ _Yeah - just sit tight and look pretty, Boss.”_

Generally, Kaz does his “wheeling and dealing” while you’re out on assignment. He always greets you with a cup of fresh coffee and a stack of paperwork a mile high - _check this contract, signature here, deal’s already done we just need the confirmation. Don’t ask questions about this one, Boss, you won’t like it, but we need it_ \- this client, though, he wants to see Big Boss in the flesh, with his own two eyes.

“Hit or stand, gringo?” says the dealer.

“Hmm, let me think about that a moment.” Kaz is about to win his eighth round of Blackjack, collecting on bets so high they’d have been kicked out of a smaller casino by now. He licks his lips and reaches for the cigarette. Flicks it out from behind his ear in the same motion he turns to look up at you, gaze positively sultry beneath the panels of his aviators. “Hey Boss, give me a light. For luck?”

You examine him: the way his arm’s slung casually over the back of the chair, the cigarette pursed between his lips, the way he’s nudged his chin up with a mischievous gleam in his eye, like he’s waiting for you to lean down and do the honour yourself. It’s a habit of his, you’ve noticed, to construct these petty little power games. Never over anything important - just a constant push and pull at the boundaries of your most inconsequential interactions no matter how many times you swat him down.

Without moving, you toss him the lighter.

He catches it with a frown. Lights the smoke, coughs on the first inhale and promptly goes bust, squandering a quarter of his winnings.

“You lost on purpose.” It’s not a question, but an observation. Kaz put on a good performance at the table, but the moment you clear the floor the spring’s back in his step.

“Well, yeah. If I’d won another few rounds we’d have been accused of cheating. Can’t make it _too_ obvious.”

You shoot him a long side-eye. “Uh huh. Didn’t you used to be a police officer?”

He wags a finger. “Counting cards isn’t cheating - it’s basic mathematics: memory, addition, probability. It’s not an exact science either; there’s still an element of chance.”

“So what you’re saying is that you made your own luck?”

“Everyone makes their own luck, Snake, otherwise we call ‘em unlucky.” He shakes his cup of chips - despite the dramatic flame out, it’s not a bad haul. “Besides - it makes a great party trick. Want me to cash these in, or are you gonna bust my ass about this?”

“Actually, I’m impressed. Where’d you pick up a talent like that?” You choose the word ‘talent’ deliberately. Kaz called it a trick - the humility was forced, but not false. He flushes, and turns his head to hide it.

“Er - I bought a book on it off an American sailor when I was about twelve. Back then, I grabbed anything western I could get my hands on. I was just trying to practice my English at first but - well, you know I always had a good head for numbers.”

You nod - Kaz’s mother had him working a till at eight. You’ve seen him run sums through his head that most people would struggle with on calculator. 

“It was all the rage by the time I arrived in America. Any Vegas joint worth their salt has instituted measures against it by now but in the 60’s it was considered chic and hip. I made a _lot_ of friends in college by showing them a good time at - oh, hey Boss, wait here a sec.” He pats you on the shoulder and wheels off to wave down a waitress. You lean against a pillar and dig out a cigar. Light and exhale, ignore the tourist to your left who starts coughing. Kaz is shaking his casino chips in this poor girl’s face, which means this is business, not pleasure.

Yeah, you bet he had a lot of friends in college, ones that don’t ask after him now - and by design. Kaz appears to conduct relationships in a transactional manner - always desperate to be impressive, to be _useful_ . He charmed your men instantly despite their initial misgivings about calling a green-eared kid like him ‘ _Commander’,_ but half of them can’t even name the city he was born in. His true talent is in making people think he’s given them a lot, when actually he’s giving them nothing at all. Even with you he dodges relentlessly, instinctively, makes you feel like you’re tearing open a package to find more parcel paper underneath. You can’t really say why you keep peeling the damn thing down layer by layer when you already know what’s inside.

Kaz slips a stack of cruzeiros into the waitresses cleavage and comes to collect you. “I did a little digging to find out Senhor Braga’s favourite brand of _cachaça_. I’m having Maria there send a gift ahead of us.”

“That’s your big plan to butter him up?”

“Hell no. See -” he throws an arm around you shoulders so he can whisper. “- it was on the pricey side, so I asked that waitress to switch bottles with a cheaper brand.”

You snort. “That’s a lot of trouble to pinch a few coins when you just won big at the blackjack table.”

Kaz rolls his eyes. “See, Boss - this is why you were flat broke when we met.”

But later, when Senhor Braga is crowing about how authentic the _cachaça_ is, you have to admit that you’re really starting to appreciate Kaz’s sense of humour. It’s a basic tenant of intelligence work, to arrange advantages your enemy doesn’t realize you have. Adam often takes this a step further and gives himself advantages that _he_ doesn’t even realize he has. Kaz’s eye for numbers extends beyond basic mathematical proficiency; he can see patterns, make predictions, work subtle adjustments into your budget that make the whole engine run smoother. He can craft a lie with accurate figures. Use an equation to make people see whatever he wants. It’s not unlike how you assess the environment, the way lines of sight interact, the angle of shadows cast by a rising or setting sun. Kaz’s instincts are novel because he possesses a kind of brilliance you didn’t realize existed until you met him.

It’s the other part of his methodology you’re not crazy about. 

Senhor Braga welcomed you into his private suite with a tray of _caipirinhas_ , a baggie of quaaludes, and a woman for each of you. You settle on the far side of the camelback couch, eyes to the sliding glass doors, shoulder turned to Braga’s hired arm-candy. She tries to dance a hand up your chest, but you remove it - gently - and shoot Kaz a stern look when you see him palm a quaalude. He has the audacity to pout, but he puts it back and slings an arm around the girl beside him. Braga greets him like an old friend; Kaz agrees that the _cachaça_ is exquisite, his sunglasses hiding the sharpest edge of his smile.

Braga, he was cagey about his specific connections but Kaz had your Intel team produce a file on him two inches thick. Typical stuff: ex-mafioso, considers himself a self made man. Fought under Branco in the sixties and was rewarded duly for his contribution. Now he was flush with American oil connections. Of course - the world runs on oil money these days, and it’s especially unavoidable in Latin America where the US has started running its economic experiments up and down the length of the continent. Braga’s suite is lit by low-lights, red and purple bulbs that bounce diamonds off the disco mirrors on the ceiling. He’s got two bodyguards reclining astride his armchair. The rest are milling about and flirting with the casino girls out by the pool on the veranda. Beyond that, São Paulo sweats in the autumn heat.

“This is really him?” asks Braga, with a dramatic flourish. His cufflinks glitter in the violet light.

You’re cracking your zippo, cigar in mouth. Kaz answers for you - _of course this is him! The legend himself!_

You can see Braga stroking his face from the corner of your vision. He has a thin, waxed mustache about twenty years out of style and an expensive watch on his left wrist. “How do I know that this is true? Big Boss hasn’t been heard from in years. Anyone could put an eyepatch on themselves and make this claim.”

Kaz is ruffled by the challenge. He often gets his back up about trivial things. You take your time lighting your cigar.

“Listen -” Kaz starts. You cut him off.

“You can’t know.”

Braga turns his head towards you, eyes half-lidded with skepticism. You take a drag off your cigar and fill the space between you with smoke. 

“Big Boss is just a title,” you continue. “A codename given to a man for services provided. It doesn’t mean anything to me, and it shouldn’t mean anything to you. The only thing that matters is the record my X.O. presented you, and the results we give you.”

Kaz is giving you a look so incredulous that you can see one of his eyebrows peeking out over the aviators.

“I bring you all the way here and that is what you have to say me?” Braga gestures for one of his bodyguards to hand him a lighter, slips a slim cigarello from his suit jacket and lights it up. The smoke is pink under the lights.

You lean back with a shrug. “Any proof I could give you would put you six feet underground. I don’t mind, but we’ve got bills to pay.”

Braga strokes his mustache, thinking this over. Kaz’s mouth is drawn into a tight, tense line; you can hear him suck in a sharp breath beneath the laughter drifting in from the balcony. Wasn’t he the one who said nothing would go wrong?

Which, of course, it doesn’t. Braga cracks a wide grin and throws his arms out. His suit jacket flares open, revealing a silk inlay and a pistol strapped to his side. “Ha! The legendary soldier has a sense of humour after all!”

Braga briefs you over the sound of the record player blaring Roberto Carlos, pops some expensive champagne as his party begins to kick up. It foams from the spout and dribbles down his wrist as he asks if you’re planning to stay for the Independence Cup. Ironic name, you think shaking your head. You watch Kaz go over the budget with Braga’s accountant from the corner of your vision. He’s got one hand hooked over the hip of that girl, pulling her taut against his side, but all his attention is on the paperwork. He’s slashing and notating judiciously, wrist snapping from one end of the paper to the other in sharp, decisive movements, talking the accountant’s ear off the whole time. 

The girl is staring into the bottom of her _caipirinhas,_ tapping a painted nail against an indent in the glass. Likely she doesn’t speak English. Kaz slides his fingers up under the hem of her shirt and she blinks, turning to meet him as he leans over to whisper something in her ear. She smiles a bit, doesn’t seem to object. 

Then again, she’s paid not to.

Braga’s not giving you a yes yet, but you can tell he’s convinced. Asks a hundred and one questions you legally can’t answer and that you wouldn’t want to anyway even if you could. You developed a series of pat sound-bites for all of these years ago, a technique you learned from Adam. He explained once - over a quart of vodka you demolished half and half together - that’s he’s memorized so many of these that he can run almost any kind of conversation on autopilot, including simple negotiations and interrogations, trusting talk to his subconscious so that his active mind can focus on observation. Said you had to be trained from birth to do something like that, John, you'll never be as good as me unfortunately.

Why would you want to be? That's why you have him. You don't want to know what you'd say or do if you turned your brain off like that.

 _Why did you go off the grid?_ asks Braga.

"Sick of the military red tape."

_You a traitor to American then?_

You take a sip of your drink and watch Kaz do a tequila shot with his date. 

"My passport still reads U.S.A."

Kaz shows the girl the whole ritual: bites the lime, takes the shot, licks the salt from the inside of his wrist with languid precision. Thumbs a dribble of citrus from his chin with a handsome chuckle.

_Are the stories true? About what happened in 1964?_

You wince, keep it imperceptible. You could crush the glass in your hand if you wanted to. On the balcony two of Braga's guards have gotten into a drunk tussle; one - a big guy in a sweat-stained tank-top; the other's wiry and sporting snakeskin boots. Kaz's girl knocks back her tequila, but he takes her hand before she can lick the salt.

"Even though I'm independent these days I can't exactly go around contradicting the official story." Braga nods thoughtfully. "- 'sides, you mean to tell me a South American would believe _anything_ ex-CIA like me has to say?"

Kaz is looking at you over the top of his aviators when he tongues a wet strip up the line of her ulnar artery. Your gazes lock as you force a canned laugh to match Braga's authentic one and Kaz's mouth twitches triumphantly. Outside, snakeskin boots turns his opponent's weight against him and launches him into the pool. Water lurches over the side as tanktop flails his way to the edge and a chorus of cheers rise from the verdana. The stink of chlorine is thick in the night air.

 _I think you and me have that in common, amigo -_ and Braga tries to toast you. You wonder sometimes what it is people see in you that makes them assume they have you all figured out. _'You seriously don't know?'_ Kaz scoffed at you during the second week of your acquaintance. _'You've got this -'_ he rolled his wrist, irritated, _'- I don't know how to describe it. It's sort of an animal charisma. Everyone wants to impress you, like you're their dad or something.'_ He said this in a tone of voice that implied he was immune to it.

Braga is easily enthralled by some mostly true story you toss him about you and Roy Campbell running the first batch of FOXHOUND recruits through hell down Panama-way back in '70. It gives you time to watch Kaz hold court across from you: his arm still slung around the girl, three guards leaning over the back the couch to listen to him lecture animatedly about the technical methodology behind card counting. He demonstrates the basic mathematics with his free hand, a depersonalized iteration of the story he told your earlier. Making them think they're getting a lot when actually, he's giving them nothing at all.

Kaz is an excellent conversationalist, spends most of the time he's not working reading whatever he can get his hands on. This is an area where he covers your weaknesses: people like to talk to you, but they love to _listen_ to Kaz. At first, you gave him the title of X.O. as a jest. Your army didn't even have one before - didn't have a name either - but you were curious to see what he'd do with such a petty concession, still partially convinced he was just an unusually precocious con artist. Which, of course, he is - or rather: he has the skillset of a con artist, and the substance of a born administrator. 

In fact: you're watching him pull a con right now, his right hand sneaking under his date to cup her ass. Her skirt's riding high, so it's not obvious when his fingers slip between her thighs. But you see the sharp breath travel down her throat, watch her bottom lip suck in under her front teeth. 

"Ah, you know I had my first gunfight in Panama,” Braga's saying fondly, slightly drunk. “I was only sixteen at the time, _merda_ , what a mess that was!" The room throbs with the tin drums of a calypso beat, the sound of a glass being struck against ceramic tile, men jeering over a card game in the next room. Kaz keeps charming his audience. Nothing gives away what he's doing under the table except the way the girl is forced to bury her face into his neck, feigning inebriation, to muffle the sounds he's drawing out of her.

“You see,” he says, and her thigh starts shuddering subtly. “The trick is to assign a value to each card aside from its -”

You set your drink down with a thud and stride across the room. Kaz isn’t expecting it when you grab him by the back of the shirt and haul him off the couch. The girl gasps and flattens against the armrest, knees pressed together and a hand over her mouth.

"What the -" Kaz starts as you drag him outside. All eyes are on you, everything gone silent except the record player. Kaz digs his heels into the carpet, so you kick his ankle out from under him and throw him over your shoulders. He tries to fight, but his blind punch leans into the momentum you've already built. When you plunge him into the pool he hits it like a cannonball, sucked under in a spout of roiling waves that ripple over the lip of the pool in all directions. It's whole seconds until he gropes a hand out of the water and drags himself to the surface.

He spits out a mouthful of water and wipes his wet bangs out of his face one eye at a time so he can glare at you. 

"What the _fuck_ was that for!?"

He looks so young with water beading his eyelashes and the patio light beneath him highlighting a faint smattering of freckles under his tan. You can't help it, you start laughing. He pouts like a cat that's been tossed out in the rain; tries to pull to his feet but slips on tile and goes plummeting ass-first back into the pool. That's when the rest of the party starts laughing too.

Braga signs the contract.

Kaz, however, spends the next two hours sulking, pretending that there’s something extremely fascinating buried in the small print of the financial terms. He parks himself at a desk in your motel room - facing away from you - and says nothing for an admirably long time. You're reclining on the bed, attempting to work through _A Monetary History of the United States_. Kaz has been bugging you to read this particular book since the night you met.

It’s not that you find reading difficult, exactly. If someone shows you how to do something once, you always remember it perfectly every time after that. Your bones, your muscles, your skin, your ears, your eyes: they learn easily. But with reading, sometimes you -

Doctor Clark said it was normal, for people who -

Eva wanted you to read books too. She was like that, after Hanoi; no less competent, but a little softer when she looked at you. She wanted to do things like go to the movies, and eat sushi together, and recommend books to you, like you’d learn something about each other from doing all this empty theater that you didn’t already learn in Tselinoyarsk.

Adam would just hand over anything he found interesting and, tapping a finger to his temple, say: _‘Don’t worry, John, I already read it for you’_. You never figured out if that was supposed to be a joke or not. It’s hard to tell with Adam; last time you saw him, he asked if you thought he’d look good with a mustache.

So many of the people you know wear masks on masks, live in endless halls of mirrors. You didn’t know anything about The Boss, but you understood each other on a primal level - deeper than words, than blood, than sex. You see that in Kaz too. Not all the time, but the first time you met - well, that's the only reason he's still alive. Kaz has so many things he wants that he never stops to think about what he needs. To be fair: you haven't figured it out yet either.

“Are you gonna ignore me all night?”

He whips around in his seat like he’s been waiting for you to say something this whole time. “I was kinda thinkin’ about it, yeah.” He pauses, runs a hand through his hair. Sighs. “What the hell was that all about?”

You perch on the edge of the bed, cigar sputtering smoke in a lazy spiral at your knee. “Are you actually asking me that?”

Kaz groans. “If this is gonna be one of those conversations where you only answer me in question form, I’m leaving.”

“Really?” you ask. He stares at you over the top of his shades.

“See - you did it again.”

“Kaz...” you've learned that you can communicate a lot just with that one syllable. Chew on it a bit and he gets a mischievous glint in his eye. Roll it along the back of your teeth when his teasing actually hits the target. Stick it in the bottom of your throat and he knows he's in trouble. He's never offered this nickname to anyone else, which means you can do whatever you want with it.

The tone you chose this time draws him out of his seat like he's a fish on a line. He sways on his feet, looking as if he's not certain why he stood up. Scratches the side of his face where the sideburns meet his jawline. “Er, about last night -”

You thought it’d take him longer to get here.

"Is that what this is about?”

“I don’t see the connection.”

The connection is obvious, but you want to see Kaz explain this to himself. You’re still not sure what his interest in you is - sexually, that is. You understand the rest of it innately. For some reason you can’t stop picking the scab.

His expression flips and suddenly he’s all smiles. “Were you… jealous?”

That’s not it, but you think Kaz might have fun believing it. He certainly seems to be having fun now, striding towards you with a countenance so confident it’s unself-aware. He slings himself into your lap, however the hand he claps on your shoulder is almost _brotherly_. “Seriously, Boss? That’s kinda -” and he snickers. “Cute, actually.”

“Mmm hmm.” You take a long, deliberate drag off your cigar and grip Kaz’s chin in your free hand. His eyes flutter open beneath the sunglasses when he realizes what you’re about to do. Well -what he _thinks_ you’re about to do. His lips pucker, trembling as his breathing picks up in anticipation.

Instead of kissing him, you blow smoke directly into his nose. He stumbles out of your lap, coughing, and hits the floor. You’re smiling as you rise from the bed and offer him your hand. He's too stunned to take it. He really thought he was getting somewhere that time.

“Get some rest, Kaz. We're driving out to Santos at dawn.”

You tap a bit of ash onto his head as you pass by. His eyes follow you all the way to the door.

VIII.

The last time you saw Eva, she was already pregnant.

No, that's not the word. She was _incubating_. Naturally, she didn't tell you until after you had sex - in a dingy little motel bed overlooking the Panama Canal, six in the morning mid-December. The window was open, letting in the scent of ocean water and exhaust, the sound of ships being loaded in the distance, bicycles clattering down the street. Her hair had grown back since Hanoi. She showered the hairspray out before kissing you, asked what you thought. You thought that she should do whatever she wanted to her hair; her looks were as much a weapon as her favourite pistol. You wouldn't tell her how to modify that either.

 _Of course you would put it that way,_ she said, and laughed at you. If she really wanted your opinion, you thought it was getting a bit long to be practical.

"And what's practical?" She employed a musical lilt when teasing. You leaned back on your palms and admired the way the damp towel clung to her figure.

"Shear off two or three inches," you replied, making a cutting motion at your left shoulder. "You can still tie it back, but anyone who wanted to grab it would have to get within grappling distance." Eva was a good grappler. It helped that men always underestimated her.

She bounced her hair, weighing the suggestion. "Short enough to fit in my bike helmet, but still long enough to pull, is that it?"

You grinned. "Sure."

She was grinning too when she crawled into your lap and dropped the towel. "No," she whispered when you moved to lay her down. "Like this. Just like this." You settled your hands in the small of her back and breathed her in. You were glad, then, to have forgiven her once. There's no way you can forgive her twice.

Eva was in Panama to help you run FOXHOUND recon on a cocaine smuggling operation. She waited until you were seeing her off to tell you about the clones. Had to say it twice because you didn't believe it. Then you had it out, right there on the outskirts of Panama City with the sun on the horizon and mosquitos buzzing all around you. Her: leaning against her bike with her long legs crossed at the ankle and her tone approximately the temperature of the Siberian wastes. You: at a loss for words. There was only one thing to say - why?

"I already know you can't give me anything I want."

"What does that mean?"

"It means that I know who you are, and I've accepted it."

"Don't tell me Zero's gonna let you raise those kids. Being his kept nursemaid is beneath you."

She reached deep into her catalogue of pre-prepared laughs and made a cruel noise at the back of her throat. "Now you're just being ridiculous. I'm not doing it for him."

"Hn, you're sure as hell not doing it for me."

Her mouth pressed into a thin, pale line. No, of course not.

"Then what is this about?"

"I -" she licked her lips, and dragged her fingers down her torso in a shaky line until her hand came to rest over her uterus. "There's something I want to understand before I die."

A classic non-answer. What else would you expect from a trained charm agent. "Can't you just tell me the truth for once?"

Her eyes were wide and clear and utterly closed to you. "I do tell you the truth."

"You've never even told me your real name."

"Oh, of course - and your name is actually 'John Doe', I'm sure."

"I don't have a name." An automatic response isn't necessarily a lie.

"Then it seems we're the same." She spun on her heel to mount the bike, making all the motions of dramatically exiting your life for good. You grabbed her wrist to stop her, hard enough that it actually surprised her. She twist her body with the weight of the bike to tear out of your grasp, but you were stronger, and you used that advantage to pull her close. She's good, but your mentor was better.

"I'm not afraid of that Jack," she whispered, so light it disappeared in the balmy evening air. "I'm trained to let men do whatever they want to me."

"Yeah, I can see that now. First Volgin, then me, now Zero."

She punched you so hard it dislocated your jaw.

That was the first and last lover's quarrel you've ever had. You don't know why you're thinking about it again. It's June - she'll be giving birth soon.

No, not birth. That's a perverse way of thinking about it. You can see a harbour now: the scent of the ocean, the sound of cargo screeching into place. Kaz is snapping his fingers under your nose.

"You alive there, Boss?"

 _He_ certainly is. Kaz is a morning person. And an evening person, _and_ late night person. He's already had three cups of coffee today and is practically vibrating. You hopped a bus to Santos at six AM - the kind with an open-air back and seating on the roof. You hung out the boot, smoking languidly and admiring the sunrise. Kaz leaned over the guard rail and quizzed you on Friedman until you elbowed him in the kneecap. _Harsh, Boss,_ he hissed, clutching his shin. You set your cigar to your lips to hide a grin. Never gets old.

So: you're alive. Kaz has the notebook out and you're discussing troop deployments for the Braga job. He's been importing Rolex watches from Taiwan at a reduced premium, but lately pirates have been ravaging the shipping routes. The MSF has never taken an aquatic job before, but you don't think it's beyond your current capabilities. Kaz chews the end of his pen as you list off soldiers with naval experience.

"- Fruit Bat is ex RAF, would've served on an aircraft carrier. Hammerhead won't say, but I'm pretty sure he was a pirate himself. Whale was a navy man -"

Kaz peers at you over his sunglasses. "Whale? Really? The uh, big guy who helps runs the med tent? Kinda quiet?"

You nod and Kaz snickers. He's been doing that around you more and more lately, that private little laugh of his.

"A navy man called Whale, go figure. Should'a just cut out the middleman and called him Humpback."

You raise an eyebrow that takes all the steam out of his joke. He straightens up and rubs the back of his head, abashed. "Uh, 'cause... well... y-you know what they say about navy guys."

You keep raising your eyebrow. You do know what they say about navy guys, which is that they have been colloquially known to engage in situational homosexuality at higher rates than other branches of the modern military. Kaz has spent the last two months trying to pry you out of your pants. Despite this, you know for a fact that he considers himself heterosexual. Apparently he also discounts his behaviour as situationally _non_ -heterosexual, which really begs the question: what, exactly, does he think he's doing?

"Geeze, nevermind," he huffs. That triggers a jittery yawn, which he attempts to swallow. That noise - a smothered breath rolling down his throat with the grace of a rock - registers differently to your ears now that you know what he sounds like when he climaxes.

Hm.

"Anyway," he makes a brushing motion, like he's tossing that social faux pas in the garbage. "I'd bet good money that they're imitation watches. In fact - I did bet good money. If Braga suspected they were fakes he wouldn't have shelled out extra for us to guard the dock overnight on top of everything."

"What makes you think they're fakes?"

"Coming in from Taiwan? C'mon, Boss, that's bootleg central in the southern shipping lanes. They used to cycle through all the stores in Yokosuka when I was growing up. Well, the ones targeting _Amerikajan_ at least. They're pretty, alright - wouldn't be able to tell just by looking at one - but you're fucked the moment you try to take it in for repair. Cheap parts, y'know."

Kaz's watch catches the light when he raises his mug.

"That how you got yours?"

"Huh?" He looks at his wrist like he forgot it was there. A shadow rises in his gaze. "Oh. No, no, this one's real. I got it from, uh -" he hesitates, pastes the smile back on. "- my dad."

You nod and take a sip of your coffee. Kaz is still holding his cup aloft, looking like he has something else to say. You stare at him and wait. He stares back, frowning.

"Aren't you going to ask why he gave it to me?"

"No. Why would I?"

He sets the mug down so hard it clatters your discarded plates. "Isn't that how you think conversation works? I was serious last night, Boss - almost everything you've ever said to me has been phrased as a question."

"Y'know, Kaz, you're the only one in the MSF who's ever critiqued my conversation skills."

"Yeah, that's because none of them -" he stops himself, like he's about to say something he shouldn't. He probably was.

"Are you trying to confess to me that the watch was stolen, not given to you?"

That really ruffles his feathers; for a split second he's genuinely shocked. Bingo.

"Ha," he puffs, expression softening. "The story's a bit more complicated than that." He lets that hang, slides out of his seat - coffee cup empty, notebook tucked under one arm. Breadcrumbs, he never stops tossing them. You never bother picking them up - after all, you've got an excellent memory.

That good memory is why you’re able follow Kaz so easily after picking up your package from Roy Campbell. You trust the man you left in charge of FOXHOUND, but you don’t exactly want him to know where you’re hanging your boots these days. You tuck the missive into your back pocket and trace the path you watched Kaz take earlier. 

Santos is a squat, bright city; all paths lead to the harbour. Hard to get lost in, good for tracking. He’s threading redundancies into his route, but sticks out like a sore thumb with his blonde hair and cream-coloured leisure suit. He claimed he had some shopping to do, but had that glint in his smile like he was getting away with lying on a technicality. It wasn’t long ago he was your prisoner; you can’t help but wonder how he’s abusing his freedom. 

Turns out: he’s schmoozing it up with some gunrunners in an abandoned warehouse on the edge of town. You scale the empty cargo out back and slip in through an open window. There’s laughter bouncing off the tin walls. Kaz is seated at an overturned crate that’s been turned into a makeshift desk, slung casually on a folding chair with his ankle hooked over one knee and his accounting book out. There are two empty shot glasses on the crate and the man in charge seems to know him well - well enough that he’s only brought three guards to oversee. They’re mid-negotiation when you swing onto the catwalk above, but you can make out the name _Senhor Braga_ and the Spanish word for _ships_. Interesting.

It's hard to follow the conversation. Kaz is more conversant in Spanish than you and the gunrunner’s speech is peppered with Portugese slang. Here’s what you gather: Kaz has made a promise to this man to sneak some of his guns onto Braga’s ships to get them past the security checks along the Central American coast. The warehouse is full of them - Soviet made, fresh out of Venezuela and bound for Guatemala and El Salvador. It’s not a bad plan - and Kaz sells it brilliantly with the slimly aplomb you’ve come to expect from him, smiles all teeth and his hands going a hundred miles a minute - but you really wish he’d filled you in on it. Especially since he’s about to get shot.

The exact moment the conversation goes south is when Kaz brags: “I always provide a service that delivers on its promise.”

He used the same line on you. The gunrunner is equally unimpressed. He leans forward, chin on his knuckles, and says in sharp, accented English: “Ah - is that the same thing you told _La CIA_ , gringo?”

Kaz freezes. You haven’t trained him out of that yet. He’s got the survival instinct of a cockroach but his mind is still running laps around his body. There’s an AK nestled in the small of his back before he can start wagging his tongue.

“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” he groans, raising his arms in surrender. Looks like he won’t be able to talk himself out of this one. The gunrunner doesn’t think so either, otherwise he would have brought more than three guys.

You sigh and start slinking your way towards the ladder at the far end of the catwalk. You didn’t bring a gun, but this can probably be handled just fine with a knife.

“Look,” Kaz is saying in his most innocently aggrieved tone of voice. “This is all a big misunderstanding -”

The gunrunner snorts. “Typical _Americano_ \- think we don’t know how to use a phone here in the lower Americas? Think I wouldn’t find out what you did in Colombia?”

Your feet hit the cement. Your eyes triangulate the intersecting line-of-sights in the warehouse: one guy watching the door, the other two framing Kaz at the other end - 

“I didn’t do anything in Colombia!”

“ _Si_? So where’s your unit?”

\- the gunrunner would be looking right at you except that there’s a stack of crates that bisects his view in the 60 degrees before his blind spot. Perfect.

Kaz is still trying to wriggle off the hook. “My unit? They’re -”

The gunrunner has his man smack Kaz across the head with his rifle. “Dead or missing to the last man!” he says, holding up an index finger “- except for one, who says the last he saw before passing out in the underbrush was Master Miller fleeing like a rat from a sinking ship!”

“If you’d just let me talk -” Kaz makes the mistake of gesturing as he speaks. “I can expla -” He gets rifle-whipped a second time.

“Hands in the air, _arrombado_!”

“Right, ah ha- silly me! Look, they’re up, they’re up!”

You slide up behind the doorman just as he exhales, twist one arm around his neck and shove the other wrist into his mouth. You drag the blade across his neck slow and deliberate, making sure it goes so deep he dies right away. His whimpers are only audible as vibrations against your skin, and then he’s silent. Drops, boneless, the to floor in a puddle of blood so dark it’s like a mirror. You grab his pistol.

“Take off his sunglasses,” the gunrunner is telling his bodyguards. You shimmy up against a stack of crates and peer around the lip. He’s slipping a handgun from the open chest of his shirt: a Barracuda with gold trim and ivory inlays. Ha - you haven’t seen a gun that ostentatious since 1964. “I always look a man in the eyes before I kill him.”

You see Kaz blinking against the light in profile. The gunrunner leans forward to examine him, quirks a cruel smile as you duck from crate to crate. 

“ _Merda_ , look at these lovely baby blues.” He reaches out to cup Kaz’s chin, but Kaz jerks away. “How old are you anyway, _docinha_?”

“Thirty two,” Kaz answers easily. It’s a good lie. Old enough to confer respect, young enough to impress. It’d be halfway convincing if he still had his shades on.

“Adorable,” purrs the gunrunner, stroking a thumb up and down the barrel of his revolver. “Always a shame to snuff out a bright, young talent, but we can’t tolerates snitches in _La_ -”

You’re tired of the theatrics, so you pull out from behind cover and nail one of the remaining guards in the head with your stolen gun. He drops and Kaz catches on immediately, uses the three seconds of confusion that fester in the din of an unsilenced gunshot to elbow his captor in the gut and wrestle him to the ground. The gunrunner uses them to dive behind the crate. 

Ah - like a rat from a sinking ship. 

You’re across the room and on him before he can catch his bearings: jam your heel into his wrist to loose his grip on the gun, kick it across the warehouse. He’s shouting “ _D-don’t hit me!”_ when your forearm presses down on his jugular.

You hear gunshots on the other side of the crate. Kaz rises, hands trembling on a pistol and blood streaked from one side of his face to the other. It smears into his hair when he goes to run a hand through it. You stand to meet him. Without looking at you, he says “Kill him too.”

You glance at the unconscious gunrunner. “Sure that’s a good idea?” He looks like he might be important.

Kaz snatches his sunglasses as he rounds the crate. “No loose ends,” he snarls, then shoots the guy in the head anyway. And just like that, it’s done. Blood pools under your toes and Kaz drops the gun like it’s on fire. 

“Won’t that come back to bite us in the ass?”

“I wasn’t using my real name.”

“I see,” you say, because there isn’t anything else.

“C’mon, Boss, we gotta dispose of the bodies.”

It isn’t any more complicated than rolling them up in canvass and tossing them off the dock. This time of day the tide will suck them out towards the South Atlantic. Their guns go with them. Kaz is silent during the whole operation, doesn’t talk to you for the whole forty minutes. The second time in twelve hours that he’s given you the silent treatment.

Back in the warehouse his face is turned away from you, jaw clenched tight as he shakily re-applies his shades. “... you followed me?” he asks finally, not quite managing to sound neutral. His voice is quivering so tense you can tell there’s about to be a real explosion. He’s been repressing it admirably these last four months, his resentment of you; masking it beneath a veneer of false cheer, channeling it into his absurd seduction games. You can see it now - he still hasn’t forgiven you for wounding his pride.

“Yeah.”

“What the hell is this? Don’t you trust me?”

You cross your arms. “Pretty strange question to ask after I caught you doing something like this behind my back.”

“I wasn’t doing it behind you back. I -”

“Were cutting a deal in secret? Did you just forget to tell me about this?”

“It’s business I arranged before we met. These guys were my contacts, not yours.”

Honestly, you’ve never seen a man so furious to still be alive.

“So... you did it behind my back.” 

_That_ makes him look at you. Kaz is fuming - and not in the cute, pretend way he usually does. “The fuck? Am I your business partner, or a P.O.W.!?”

“Neither. You’re my Executive Officer - a position you’re not exactly qualified for and that I’m not sure you’ve actually earned yet.”

“Snake, what the hell is your problem?”

“My problem is that I just saved your life and you haven’t even said ‘thank you’ yet.”

His jaw squares. “Excuse me?”

 _Now_ this is going somewhere. “It’s easy, Kaz. Just three words: _‘thank you, Boss’._ ”

“Oh yeah, I’m _real_ grateful for that rumour you spread in Colombia to poison my reputation with every contact I made before you _fucking_ _press ganged_ me.”

“Usually when people believe a lie about you, it’s because you’ve given them reason to do so.”

Kaz's feet shift into the stance he takes when he’s about to throw a punch. Your gaze flickers over his knees, his shoulders, back to his face. You smile.

“What, Kaz? Want a rematch?” 

His hands are clenched so tight they’re trembling. “I told you, I haven’t -”

“Haven’t lost yet?” You cock your head back. “If you still think you can win, samurai, then go for it.”

He lunges at you, fist first. Kaz’s left hook is pretty good, but you dance astride it easily. From behind, you knife-hand the nape of the neck. He goes stumbling until he hits the crates and has to brace himself for a moment.

“Feel better?”

“Not even close!” he spits, and comes at you again. He thought it out this time - feints at the swing, tries to get behind you. The martial art he learned in the JSDF is practical - lacks the ornamentation of other Japanese styles you’ve encountered - but Kaz isn’t watching his feet. You trip him on the last step, then catch him by the back of his shirt to interrupt his fall. He hangs like that, sunglasses askew.

“I’ve told you before that CQC requires a different method of shifting your weight than _Taiho-Jutsu_. It’s impressive that you’ve managed to work what I’ve taught you so far into what you already know, but if you’re doing a little bit of both you end up doing neither very well. That might work on a less experienced opponent, but it won’t work on me.”

He spits, aiming for your eye, so you drop him on his face. 

You’re expecting him to pull to his feet and take another swing at you, so it admittedly catches you off-guard when he barrels into your shins and tackles you to the ground instead.

“Why - won’t - you - _just_ -” Kaz gets his hands twisted in your shirt, but you headbutt him before he can specify what he “just” wants you to do. His hands fly up to protect his sunglasses, breaking his hold. He’s on his back a second after that, woozy, bloody, his face caged between your arms.

“Ready to say ‘thank you’ yet?”

“Oh, _fuck_ off,” he rasps. Then he tries to kiss you.

You hit him, hard. With your knuckles, not your palm. He goes slack beneath you, laughing low at the back of his throat. “Boss...” His lip is split, smearing his teeth with blood. “- I already know you want to fuck me, so stop pretending you don’t.” He hooks an ankle around yours and drags his heel up the length of your calf.

Oh, you get it now. Kaz is one of those men whose pride can’t take even a perceived insult. He won’t accept being defeated, he _demands_ to be conquered. You’ve known people like that before; usually they don’t go around picking fights they can’t win. 

“You really think that?”

His hands come up around your neck, claw at your shoulders. “Y-Yeah, I do.”

He thinks he can get leverage over you like this. But he’s made a miscalculation- he’s actually attracted to you. 

For example - he’s oddly abashed, almost boyish, when you pluck the sunglasses off his face. “You’re flustered,” you observe, setting the shades on the crate above. “Aren’t you always bragging about how you’re good at this?”

It’s an easy mistake. Even you’ve fallen for that trick before.

Kaz only misses a beat. His smile is shaky, but still infuriatingly smug. “What? I thought you weren’t interested in how I was with women.”

“You’re right Kaz. I’m not a woman.” You grab him by the jaw and smash his face into the concrete. His elbow is in your eye a second later. He bucks you off and the two of you go rolling around on the ground until you pin him down sideways, his torso trapped between your thighs. You dunk him into a muddy puddle at the edge of the warehouse, where all the run off from the rusted walls and oil drums has gathered in the gutters.

He pulls up with a mouthful of sludge that he graciously spits in your eye. You stumble to you feet, blinded. Kaz’s first punch sends you reeling but you catch the second one, blinking mud and gravel out of your socket. He’s still trying to modify his CQC. If he were a better study and stopped trying to be so damn clever all the time he’d be good enough to counter the arm you lock around his elbow.

You slam him up against the crate, pin him with his arms by his head. He’s bleeding from the mouth again, laughing ugly. “Is this what gets you off?”

“Hm. Looks like I should be asking you the same question.” You reach around to cup his erection. He’s so hard you can feel him twitching towards your palm. 

“ _God_ !” He throws back his head and lets out a moan, although it’s more frustrated than aroused. “Are you trying to _kill me_ , Snake?”

“Funny - you won’t say thank you, you won’t ask for something directly. Are these the unparalleled Miller negotiation skills I’m paying for?”

“Wh-what?”

You grind against him, slow and uneven. The noise that comes out of him is like a dying animal. His fingers curl into the wooden crate until you can see the nails turning white. Bit of an overreaction, in your opinion. He’s been stringing this out all weekend, but his answer to a little bit of teasing is to immediately crumble?

“Y'know, I think you’re the one who actually wants something here, Kaz.”

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” he hisses, but the way he’s arching his cock into your hand seems pretty desperate.

“Just because you're smart doesn't mean you need to find an angle on everything. Sometimes honesty can be its own reward.”

His forehead thumps against the crate. “You’re such... a bastard…”

“I mean, if you’re fine on your own-” You retrieve your hand and move to put an inch of space between you.

“Wait -” he grabs your wrist. He’s turned half towards you, lips plump with blood and his left eye red and puffy from where you bounced him off the cement. He takes your hand and hooks it in neckline of his shirt, tugs until you start popping the buttons, hums when the pads of your fingers brush his bare skin.

“What do you want?” you ask quietly, massaging your thumb along his bottom rib.

“I -” and he sounds worse than he did asking for his own execution.

“Yeah?”

“I-I want you to fuck me,” he croaks, voice cracking on the ‘u’ in _fuck_.

You give him what he wants: one hand bruising finger-prints into his hip, the other tucked snug in the divot of his neck, right where his carotid artery flutters close to the skin. You fuck him between his sweat-slicked thighs because the two of you have a long hike to the airfield tomorrow and you don’t want to listen to him complain the entire time. Kaz doesn’t know your intentions, however. Every time the motion of your cock forces the cleft of his ass wide, he whimpers and his pulse goes wild under your palm. He wants you to take this further. 

You think of the woman Kaz was fingering in the casino, were bothered that she would let him get away with such shameless behaviour. You’re on the other side of it now. The way Kaz is bucking back against the timing of your thrusts tells you that he would probably let you do anything you wanted to him, any way you wanted to do it. You’ve got him pressed up so tight against the crate that his face rakes across the unfinished wood every time you rock between his thighs. It has to hurt, based on the ugly, senseless noises he's making at the back of his throat. But it seems like he _wants_ it to hurt.

You take Kaz in your hand and finish him off, wrap your arms around his waist to hold him up as he shudders through his orgasm. He sags against the crate and buries his face in his hand as he tries to catch his breath.

 _Holy shit_ , he says, and then he elbows you off so that he can clean up.

You sit on the gunrunner’s desk, right beside Kaz’s sunglasses. Hand them over when he slumps down next to you on the floor. You spark up a cigar and let the smoke fall around you as Kaz slowly does his shirt back up, a button at a time. 

“Shit,” he mutters again, rubbing his jawline. “I think I have a splinter in my face.”

He turns to show you. It’s big enough that you can pluck it out, so you do.

“ _Boss-!_ ” He clasps his cheek and the two of you stare at each other, smoke spiraling between. You have no idea what to expect. He could be sullen, or cowed, or furious - oh yeah, he’ll be mad when he sees his face in a couple hours all right. It’s possible you were wrong about him and you’ve made him an enemy again.

What he _does_ is crack a lopsided grin and start laughing - soft, but genuine. You grin back, toothy around the butt of your cigar.

“Well, it all worked out in the end,” he crows, slapping the crate. “This way we get to keep both the money _and_ the guns!”

“Don’t you ever learn?”

“Yeah,” he pushes to his feet. “- to never let a good opportunity go to waste.” He leans over as you take a drag off your cigar, kisses you before you have a chance to exhale. You open your mouth under his and this time he breathes the smoke in.

He coughs, tries to hide it like he’s clearing his throat. Slides his shades on with a practiced gesture that tosses his head back. It’s not just his English Kaz learned from American movies - it’s the rest of his affect too. “I guess we need to figure out how to get these out of the city.”

“I got a few strings we can pull.”

He gives you a two-fingered salute. “Wouldn’t have expected any less, Boss.”

You watch him saunter towards the entrance of the warehouse where a square of evening light is cutting across a puddle. He checks his reflection in the water: counting his teeth, prodding the gash on his cheek, licking a palm and using it to slick his hair back. The light is burning the edges of his silhouette, he’s like a candle in that tacky white suit of his. You _have_ known people more artificial than Kaz, but they aren’t like that on purpose. Everything about him trembles so close to the surface. You run lazy fingers through your beard and think of how he looked when you had him pinned down. Ripping open a package even though you already know what’s inside.

 _Now_ you knew what to do with him.

IX.

_Three weeks after Paz goes into the Ocean, you get a missive from Eva. Kaz hands you the tape with a suggestive flourish - snaps the envelope out of your reach as you go to grab it. “An old flame?” he wonders. You decline to answer and he gets nosy until you tell him off. That pisses him off for some reason. It doesn’t matter - your past is over so it’s none of his business. It’s barely your business anymore._

_You don’t listen to it._

_You tell yourself you won’t listen to it -_

_Four weeks after Paz goes into the ocean, you’re fiddling with the tape at the edge of the R &D strut. Strangelove stalks you down. She gentle with you since the incident with your concussion. Honest too. She asks you about the tape and you tell her the truth. The conversation you have afterward sits poorly. You respect Strangelove, like her even, but there’s a streak in her that reminds you of Zero. _

_Zero... his hand was in this the entire time - a third ghost sleeping in your bed, just like with Eva. You find Kaz asleep at his desk when you go to deliver the daily performance reports. You decide not to wake him, watch him from the door. He’s been working himself harder than usual, to the bone, all for you. You don’t need him to perform these useless gestures of self-recrimination to show how sorry he is. You were relieved to forgive him once. Made sure he knows you won’t forgive him twice._

_You return to your quarters, pass out in your fatigues. Become lost in a tangled jungle of dark memories and dreams: your mentor’s hands, Eva with her scar, holding your clones to her breast, the smell of dead fish roiling up from the riverbed in Tselinoyarsk, the first gun you ever held -_

When you snap awake, Kaz is in your room - leaned casually against the door-frame, chewing on his cheek, arms crossed tight. His sunglasses are tucked in the collar of his uniform and he’s carrying an uncorked bottle of whiskey.

“Kaz?” you venture, voice thick with sleep. Not sure if you’re still dreaming. He tries to smile, but it doesn’t reach his eyes. You haven’t seen a smile that reaches his eyes for a while now.

“Hey, Boss.” He salutes. Presents the bottle. “Wanna go for a ride?”

“What?”

He goes to your locker and starts rifling through your civvies, tosses you a leather jacket. “I’ve been thinking. We both work too much, y’know?” 

You catch the jacket and stare at him, uncomprehending. _He’s_ the one who’s been working too much. You would kill for an assignment right now, but it’s not safe for you to leave international waters.

Kaz rolls whatever he’s about to say around in his mouth a couple seconds too long. “So I thought -” he already said that. “Why don’t you and I get some fresh air, huh? I’ve got an Op lined up - just a recon mission. There’s an island Chico keeps going on about, so I had Morpho take a look. Seems like it’d be a great place to set up a forward operating base, but I want your opinion first. Whaddaya say?”

Your eyes follow the motion of the whiskey bottle. Kaz has a pattern with liquor, which is that it gets harder and dirtier the more honest he wants to be. “Just you and me?” you wonder, meeting his eyes.

His eyebrows jump. He looks caught, but recovers quickly. That’s the thing about Kaz - he always recovers quickly. 

“Er -” he rests his cheek in his palm as his gaze slides towards the floor. “Yeah,” he says softly, like it’s just occurred to him. “Just you and me, Boss. I think that’d be nice.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next: DATE WITH ▓▓▓▓▓▓▓


End file.
